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THE LAWS OF PROVIDENCE 



IMPRIMATUR. 

Patritius Joannes, 

Archiep. Philadelphiensis. 



the: 



LAWS OF PROVIDENCE 

BY 

FATHER HENRY RAMIERE 

OF THE SOCIETY OF JESUS 




PHILADELPHIA 

MESSENGER OF THE SACRED HEART 
114 South Third Street 
1891 



COPYRIGHT 
1891 

by Rev. R. S. Dewey, S. J. 



The present treatise forms the entire first part 
of Father Ramiere's work on The Hopes of the 
Church. It is complete in itself and is now pub- 
lished separately as a number of the Sacred Heart 
Library. This is a periodical publication of stand- 
ard expositions of the theological principles which 
lie at the base of Catholic devotion. Among all 
Christians there is no more fundamental truth than 
the doctrine of Providence, in which we are taught 
to see the essential Fatherhood of God over the crea- 
tures of His hand. It would be difficult to find a 
more satisfactory exposition of this doctrine, in its 
application to the Church and the world, than that 
which is here given by one who was at once a profes- 
sional teacher of theology and a successful expounder 
of theological doctrine to Christians in general. It 
is not unworthy of the great reputation won for the 
author by his classical book on The Apostleship of 
Prayer. The only change that has been made in 
the text has been the omission of a few lines referring 
to the other parts of the work, along with which it 
originally appeared. 

R. S. DEWEY, S. J. 
Feast of St, Thomas Aquinas, 7 March, 1891. 

(5) 



INTRODUCTION. 



Providence is that attribute of God by which 
He directs the action of all His creatures, and in 
particular that of beings endowed with reason, toward 
the end He assigned them in creating them. 

From this simple notion there is an evident 
consequence. We can understand nothing in the 
happenings of this world unless we know the laws of 
Providence. Those who seek elsewhere than in the 
knowledge of these laws the explanation of the des- 
tinies of society are as wise as he w T ho would seek 
outside of the laws of astronomy for an explanation 
of the movements of the heavenly bodies. 

A wilful and culpable ignorance of these laws 
of Providence is at the bottom of all the gross errors 
into which a great number of pretended philosophers 
have fallen in our day. But, for many Christians 
also, the forgetfulness of these laws is the cause of a 
fatal discouragement. 

How can we otherwise explain the strange con- 
trast between the spirit of the Christian religion and 
the character of the greater number of those who 
practise it ? In this holy religion everything tends 
to uplift souls and to enkindle in them boundless 
desires. " Lift up your hearts on high," the Church 
cries without ceasing — Sursum corda / Whatever is 
earthly and finite she calls on us to despise as un- 

(7) 



8 



INTRODUCTION. 



worthy of us. She shows us the Infinite alone as 
the goal toward which we should tend — the Infinite 
in duration, the Infinite in greatness, the Infinite in 
bliss. To reach this glorious goal she offers us, once 
again, the infinite power of grace as our armor of 
strength : the infinite price of the Blood of God, 
which she gives us for our redemption ; the infinite 
dignity of Divine adoption, which she confers upon 
us even here as the pledge of the inheritance pre- 
pared for us in a better life. 

It would seem, then, that Christians should be the 
most courageous and most confident of all men. 
While they scorn all that springs from their own 
nothingness, they should join with this generous 
humility a proud esteem of the heavenly gifts which 
they have received from God. You would expect 
to see them holding high their heads in the midst of 
their more unfortunate fellows, who have no other 
support than error and no other hope than final 
nothingness. 

And yet it is almost just the contrary which we 
see. Little-mindedness is the capital vice of the 
servants of God, just as pride is the capital vice of 
His enemies. How often do we see the heirs of the 
promises wretchedly wavering and finally yielding to 
fatal discouragement? At the most, they think they 
are doing quite enough if they can preserve faith and 
hope in the midst of the scandals around them. 

Once more, how can you explain this deplorable 
state of things, unless you acknowledge that a very 



INTRODUCTION. 



9 



great number of Christians do not know how to con- 
sider in their true light the happenings of the world 
around them? They know the laws of Providence, 
but they mistake their application. They have a di- 
vine torch ready to their hand, but because they 
know not how to hold it up with a firm hand, they 
let themselves go forward in the midst of darkness. 
Instead of looking upon the facts of which they are 
witnesses as a shining confirmation of the truths 
taught them by their faith, they imagine that they 
find in them, on the contrary, a constant refutation 
of her divine teachings. The moral world offers to 
their bleared eyes only a confusion a thousand times 
darker than the chaos whence sprang the physical 
world. 

In consequence, what is sure to happen ? At the 
very moment of victory, discouragement seizes hold 
of the soldier. Lost in the midst of the boundless 
field of battle, blinded by the dust and deafened by the 
cries of contending warriors and worn out by fatigue, 
he sees around him only tumultuous movements and 
discerns not the end toward which they tend, nor 
the result which they should produce. Meanwhile 
the general, whose genius animates and directs this 
immense multitude, sees his orders executed with care 
by his soldiers; and the enemy himself helps unknow- 
ingly to the realization of his plan. The general, 
then, already feels the certainty of success, and is in- 
toxicated with the glory of his triumph. 

A like assurance should be the fruit of the con- 



10 



INTRODUCTION. 



siderations which we are to present to the Christian 
reader in the course of this book. Evidently, we 
cannot produce this result, unless we can keep stead- 
ily to the point of view whence the Supreme Arbiter 
of things directs human events. This is the only end 
of the present work. 

We shall lay down, as exactly as possible, the laws 
which Divine Providence imposes on the wills of men 
and obliges them to work out, without in any way de- 
stroying their free will. We shall set forth the plan 
of battle which the Mighty Head of the City of God 
has followed without variation from the beginning of 
the world, in the strife waged against Him by the pas- 
sions of men and the malice of hell. Thus we may suc- 
ceed in dispelling the sad illusion which causes us to 
see only disorder in that moral order which is a 
thousand times more admirable than the physical 
order. 



CHAPTER I. 



FIRST LAW OF PROVIDENCE: WHATEVER IS DONE IN 
THE WORLD, TENDS TO GLORIFY GOD. 

This law is the essential and immutable basis of 
the whole moral order. It is the rule by which every- 
thing must be measured, and the principle from which 
all other laws must flow. If this is admitted, the re- 
lations of the creature with the Creator and of men 
among themselves, can be brought into order with 
the greatest ease. If it is denied, there is no more 
order or morality or duty. Selfish interests and 
brutal passions alone remain standing as the founda- 
tion of human society: in other words, all that is left 
from which to bring forth order are those very things 
which cause disorder. 

We cannot, therefore, dispense ourselves from lay- 
ing down solidly this fundamental law. In view of 
this necessity, the reader will pardon us for presenting 
him with considerations more or less abstract. Even 
should it cost us an effort, we ought to think our- 
selves happy to be able, under God's own guidance, 
to lift ourselves up to those luminous heights whence 
we may contemplate in its sublime unity the im- 
mense movement which He imprints on His crea- 
tion. 

(11) 



12 



THE LAWS OF PROVIDENCE. 



The most precious enjoyment of the scholar is 
experienced when, after long labors, he at last has 
grasped the law which governs the movement of a 
star in its orbit. * How much sweeter should be the 
satisfaction of our own understanding, if we can but 
acquire the certainty of having found that highest 
law which all the worlds obey. 

This law is expressed in our formula. To 
understand it better, we will, first of all, consider it 
in itself; then we will examine it in its application 
to the present order of things. But we shall much 
more easily understand its generality after we have 
analyzed it into a certain number of particular laws, 
which form, in a way, its different parts. 



i. 

The glory of God is the prime and essential end of creation. 

I. Let us place ourselves at the beginning of 
things. Going back through the course of the ages, 
we come to that first moment when the world came 
forth from nothingness at the voice of the Most 
High. Let us go yet further back. If our imagina- 
tion refuses us here, our reason, at least, has this 
power. We can very clearly conceive that, before the 
beginning of time, God existed alone, and that even 
then He was fully sufficient to Himself. The earth 
had not yet begun its revolutions around the sun. 



FIRST LAW OF PROVIDENCE. 



13 



The sun did not yet flood the heavens with its light 
and heat. Space was dumb and void : or rather, it 
was full of God alone, speaking unto Himself, show- 
ing forth unto Himself His Infinite Glory, and re- 
joicing in His own bliss. 

What motive could have led God, so infinitely 
rich and happy, to come forth from His repose to 
create the world ? Evidently, not the desire of per- 
fecting Himself, or the need of acquiring something. 
What could He expect from His creature, when His 
creature could have nothing except from Him ? 
Since He was to give everything, He could receive 
nothing. Moreover, it is clear that He who exists 
of Himself must find in Himself whatever is neces- 
sary to His own perfection and happiness. Every 
possible perfection He possesses. There is only one 
thing which of necessity is shut out from Him — 
that is, imperfection, nothingness. 

God, therefore, could not be moved to create the 
world by the desire of increasing His own perfection. 
Only one motive could have determined Him — the 
desire of spreading beyond Himself something of 
His own infinite fulness. This desire is an inclina- 
tion natural to goodness. The less need there is of 
acquiring, the more is the need felt of communicat- 
ing. This is a sublime need, infinitely different 
from that which we experience from the great void 
we find within ourselves. The need of acquir- 
ing something is born from our own poverty and 
creates in us sorrow and disquiet. Just so the need 



14 



THE LAWS OF PROVIDENCE. 



of pouring itself forth which springs from the very 
plenitude of the Divine Goodness is all calm and 
supreme. 

Undoubtedly, God found in His own infinite per- 
fection an object capable of satisfying His infinite 
faculties. Therefore, without any loss of bliss to 
Himself, He might forever have abstained from pro- 
ducing anything outside of Himself. But, on the 
other hand, in His infinite goodness He saw the 
model and the reason of an infinity of beings who 
might reproduce outside of Him and in different 
degrees those perfections which in Him are gathered 
up in undivided unity. Thus the sun gathers up into 
the unity of its light the undefined variety of the 
rays which go forth over all the points of space and 
reproduce its image. The created rays of which 
Uncreated Light might become the source, the possi- 
ble images of His infinite beauty, God loved, yet not 
of necessity : for without them He was infinitely 
perfect and infinitely happy. But there was nothing 
to withhold Him from stretching out to them that 
necessary love which He has for Himself. He could 
not love them apart from Himself, for they have 
nothing lovable apart from Him. Moreover, His 
power of love, infinite as it is, is fully satiated in His 
own infinitely lovable perfection. But He could 
love them in Himself and for Himself. 

It is thus that God could create, without losing 
anything of His own immutability ; and while de- 



FIRST LAW OF PROVIDENCE. 



15 



creeing the existence of His creatures, He ceased 
not to centre in Himself all His acts. 

Here, then, is the only end which His wisdom 
could have had in view when, going forth from His 
rest, He produced the world : to exercise His own 
good pleasure and His love in His works ; to repro- 
duce in their boundless variety the wonders of His 
own infinite unity ; to communicate, to some more 
and to some less, features of that beauty beyond com- 
pare, which is His own possession in its fulness ; and 
to make them share, each according to its own nature, 
in His own unutterable bliss. 

This was the only end worthy of God. It is also 
the most glorious end for His creatures. 

What could be nobler for a being sprung from 
nothing than to be called to show forth the Supreme 
Beauty, and to be loved with that very love with 
which God loves His own infinite goodness ? It is 
right, then, to say that the external glory of God is 
the essential end of creation. For by this glory, 
external to Himself, we mean just this manifestation 
of perfections of the Creator by His creatures. 

This is what Reason, in perfect accord with Faith, 
reveals to us concerning the origin of things. Crea- 
tures can have but one end, because the Creator Him- 
self could have but one end in producing them, 
namely, His own glory. Undoubtedly, He was free 
to create or not to create. But if He determined to 
produce anything outside of Himself, He was not 



16 



THE LAWS OF PROVIDENCE. 



free to give it any other end than Himself, for the 
reason that He alone can be the final end of His own 
actions. He could not, without destroying Himself, 
dispense himself from centering all things in Him- 
self. He is the first beginning of all things, and it 
is necessary that He should be also their last end. 
It is the law of His being. It is a law supremely 
glorious, imposed by the supreme perfection of His 
own nature upon His almighty will. What reason 
have we for astonishment if, being bound Himself 
by this law, He should impose it on every work that 
comes forth from His hand ? 

We cannot deny this first law without refusing our 
minds to evidence, and at the same time destroying 
both the notion of God and the notion of the crea- 
ture. To give to the world in general, and in par- 
ticular to humanity, any other end, we must choose 
one of two things: either we must uphold that 
humanity is an effect without a cause, and that in- 
stead of being created by God it has been produced 
simply from nothing ; or we must pretend that 
humanity has received from God no end worthy of 
Him, and that the Divine Workman, in producing 
this masterpiece of His hands, has acted by chance, 
not knowing what He did. That is, we must deny 
to God either power or wisdom : and this is equiv- 
alent to denying Him any existence, for a God Who 
should not be infinitely powerful and infinitely wise 
would no longer be God. 



FIRST LAW OF PROVIDENCE. 



17 



Before, then, entering on an examination of the 
relations which human events may have with the 
glory of God, we can rest assured, in virtue of the 
most evident of all reasoning, that without fail they 
must end in exalting the Divine glory. Reason as 
well as Faith tells us that if the least movement of the 
least atom did not tend directly or indirectly toward 
this end, it would be necessary to deny, along with 
the existence of God, all truth and all evidence. 

This assurance is of itself sufficient to strengthen 
our minds in the midst of the storms that shake the 
earth. What though darkness surround us and evil 
seem to prevail? "What though the enemies of God 
triumph, the ground tremble beneath our feet, and 
the stars of the firmament fall into the abyss, still we 
may close our eyes and await with confidence the re- 
turn of light. Even though the night should last as 
long as the world lasts, still it could not resist the sun 
of eternity. The tempest will pass, and its furious 
disorder will be found to have wrought powerfully for 
the consummation of God's order. 

II. Let us try to understand better yet that 
what we have said is of the most absolute necessity. 
For this, it is enough to consider that when God in 
the counsels of His Wisdom determined to create the 
world, He foresaw, not confusedly, but in their least 
details, all the happenings of which this world was to 
be the stage. He saw, shut up in the treasures of 
His might, an infinity of other possible worlds, whose 
production would have given room to a more or less 
2 



18 



THE LAWS OF PROVIDENCE. 



complete manifestation of His attributes. By a 
choice that was perfectly free, He preferred the 
world of which we form a part to all those which He 
left in nothingness. Now, He would not have been 
free to make this choice, if a single one of the hap- 
penings which He foresaw were to be accomplished in 
this world had been contrary to His own end. Of 
course, He was master in His own creation, and 
might demand of it a higher or a lower degree 
of that external glory which alone it is capable of 
giving Him. But He was not master in the sense 
that He could dispense any of the elements which 
make up Creation from accomplishing in its whole 
extent the design which He had conceived when He 
produced them. 

Moreover, we know that nothing is done here 
below without God's concurrence. A creature is not 
less incapable of self-preservation, of self-movement, 
of acting on other creatures, without God's aid, than 
it was incapable of coming forth from nothing with- 
out the help of His hand. It is, then, in God and 
through God that all men move and act, even those 
who give no heed to obeying Him and all whose 
movements tend to the direct contrary of His designs. 
It is clear to everyone that God could not preserve 
them in their liberty and lend His concurrence to all 
their acts, were He not certain of drawing His own 
glory from each of those acts and of constraining 
their indocile liberty to His own service, even from 
their very revolt. 



FIRST LAW OF PROVIDENCE. 



19 



The animal man, if he chooses, may see in the 
movements which agitate human society, only what 
is patent to the eyes of the flesh — the blind and dis- 
ordered strife of interests and passions. But we 
should be able, with the double light of Reason and 
of Faith, to discern God everywhere present, every- 
where acting, and making use of the most rebellious 
instruments to reach His own ends. 

" Behold, " says the Spouse in the Canticles, 
" He standeth behind our wall, looking through the 
windows, looking through the lattices." (ii. 9.) 

All creation is but this transparent wall through 
which the Christian soul knows well how to perceive 
the Eternal Love. Those who have not the sense of 
God see everywhere only nothingness and disorder ; 
but the unerring instinct of Faith knows how to dis- 
cern the all powerful action of the Sovereign Order 
weaving from all the scattered threads its wondrous 
web. That which is an impenetrable veil to the 
eyes of the flesh is to Faith a manifestation full of 
light. Faith knows that the present is nothing in 
itself, and has no reality except as a preparation for 
the eternal future. Faith fixes her gaze on that 
which is eternal in the present, on that which is 
divine in the human ; and she knows not how to see 
aught else. Those who see aught else, see nothing. 
They see less than nothing, for they see falsehood. 
What they call great designs, important events, suc- 
cesses, reverses, what are they all but shadows that 
pass and chase before them other shadows, all alike 



20 



THE LAWS OF PROVIDENCE. 



to be seen and then to vanish in the depths of eternal 
nothingness? And what remains of it ? Just that 
result which God had in view, and for which His 
very enemies have labored without willing it. 

Great is the peace and sweet the light which has 
dawned on him who succeeds in piercing through the 
shades of created things, and sees across the deceitful 
and fleeting vision the changeless truth. He has 
lifted himself above the discordant noises of the 
world, which no longer strike his ear except when, in 
the mingling concert of the material and spiritual 
creation, their very dissonances bring out all the 
Divine harmony. 

Yet it must be acknowledged that it is not easy for 
our understanding to lift itself up to this height, and 
with the eye of the spirit to embrace this harmonious 
unity of all things. Reason tells us that everything 
must be in order under a God Who is infinitely wise; 
but experience seems to assure us of the contrary, at 
least so far as the moral world is concerned. How 
can we reconcile these two opposing witnesses ? How 
can we bring into accord that which is and that 
which ought to be? How can we explain the dis- 
order of society in the midst of universal harmony? 
For this we must know the special designs of God 
concerning His rational and free creatures. This is 
to be the object of our second study. 



FIRST LAW OF PROVIDENCE. 



21 



II. 

In the present order, God wills to be glorified by making man 
divine. 

I. To understand this law, and to grasp its ex- 
act meaning, it is enough to make application to 
humanity of those general principles which we have 
established with regard to creation. 

God, we said, could have no other motive to de- 
termine Him to create than the desire of manifesting, 
outside of Himself, His divine attributes and of 
pouring forth upon the beings which have come from 
His hands the effusion of His own infinite fulness. 

Now, among all creatures, those whose nature 
best represents the divine perfection, those who are 
the most capable of receiving the communication of 
His divine bliss, are beyond all contradiction crea- 
tures that are endowed with reason, namely, angels 
and men. It is in them, therefore, that God, most 
of all, will realize the designs of love which led 
Him to create. It is in them, most of all, that He 
will find His glory. 

He at once finds His glory in the production of 
the soul, a substance spiritual like Himself and 
like Himself immortal; whose simplicity, the image 
of His own ineffable simplicity, still comprises in it- 
self so wonderful a multiplicity of acts and powers ; 
and whose being, intelligence, and will reproduce the 
Trinity of His own Persons : which, last of all, 



22 



THE LAWS OF PROVIDENCE. 



knowing Him and loving Him, as He knows and 
loves Himself, experiences even like Him the glori- 
ous impossibility of finding its full satisfaction else- 
where than in the possession of the infinite. 

Therefore God draws great glory from the cre- 
ation of man, but this glory is only the beginning 
of that which He set before Himself when He gave 
man being. It is most of all by the happiness of 
His reasonable creature, by the development of its 
faculties, by the intercourse of love which He dis- 
poses it to enter upon with Himself, that He intends 
to be glorified. 

This is all very different from those purely material 
beings who receive from the creative action of God 
every element of their perfection, and who have 
only to suffer themselves passively to be clothed by 
His munificence with the adornments of their 
beauty. On the contrary, the free being is called to 
work along with God in perfecting itself. Accord- 
ing as this being lends or refuses to God its con- 
currence, the nature which it received when drawn 
forth from nothing will take the first or the last 
place in the hierarchy of created beings. 

This is why the Scripture notices that, after pro- 
ducing each of His other works, God rejoiced within 
Himself, and bore witness of their beauty. God saw 
that they were good. On the contrary, when He had 
created man, He kept silence. He recognized that 
there were still many things wanting to this work, 
which was yet the most perfect of all. // is not good 



FIRST LAW OF PROVIDENCE. 



23 



that man should be alone. Why, then, should society 
be necessary to him, unless because he is incom- 
plete in himself and has need to come to the com- 
pletion of himself by his own labor, aided by the 
help of those like him. The Divine Workman did 
not believe it right to rejoice in His masterpiece and 
declare it to be truly good, until, after long trial, He 
should have brought it to its perfection and fully 
developed and fully satisfied the faculties which He 
had given to it when He created it. Well done, 
thou good and faithful servant, enter into the joy of thy 
Lord. 

II. But the happiness which God designs for His 
reasonable creature, by which alone it can give Him 
the glory which He expects from it ; this inter- 
course which He designs to set up with His creature, 
and for which He expects its free co-operation ; this 
perfection which the creature is to add to that per- 
fection already received from the Creator, may be 
of more than one kind. 

First of all, there was a natural perfection and 
a natural happiness in store for it. This happiness 
would, in any case, have consisted in the knowledge 
and love of God; for God is the essential goal of 
our tendencies, and so long as we do not rest in 
Him we shall never find peace. The infinite is the 
home of the reasonable soul; so long as she is held 
down by the finite and the created she must experi. 
ence the torments of exile. But, by its nature, it 
can know the infinite only by the finite, and reach 



24 



THE LAWS OF PROVIDENCE. 



up to the Creator only by means of His creatures. 
Man, then, will have reached his natural perfection 
when he shall know perfectly the highest truth, in 
so far as it is reflected in the two-fold world of 
spirit and body; when he shall love perfectly the 
Divine Goodness, in so far as it is the fountain-head 
of all finite good ; when he shall admire uncreated 
beauty in the great works of nature and the splen- 
dors of reason. 

The complete development of the faculties of 
man under these different aspects, the fulness of the 
knowledge and love and joy of God in creatures and 
of creatures in God, joined to exemption from all 
pain and to the certainty of immortality, would have 
constituted the natural happiness of man. 

Would man, in the possession of this happiness, 
ever have suspected the possibility of a higher bliss? 
It is difficult to say. What is certain is that the 
absence of such bliss would have caused in his facul- 
ties no want, properly so called, for our faculties 
experience a want only when they are deprived of the 
object which they were naturally destined to attain. 

Natural happiness, then, would have sufficed for 
man. Would it have sufficed equally for God ? Un- 
doubtedly. Who, then, would have had the right 
to demand from Him aught else ? His creature ? 
But God owed nothing to the creature and could, 
had He so wished, have left it in its nothingness. 
His own wisdom ? But God was bound by His own 



FIRST LAW OF PROVIDEN'CE. 



25 



wisdom only to satisfy fully the faculties and desires 
of the beings sprung from His hands. 

Therefore, even though He had granted to His 
creature no other perfection and no other happiness, 
still He would have acquired rights to the undying 
gratitude of His creature. His justice would have 
been fully satisfied, and His wisdom could have de- 
manded nothing more. 

But what would have been sufficient to the wis- 
dom and justice of God could not suffice to His 
goodness. That natural felicity which would have 
satisfied fully the faculties of man could not content 
the unspeakable need which God feels to communi- 
cate Himself. It was too little for Him to grant us 
in an image, however excellent it may have been, 
His own life and blessedness. It was necessary that 
He should give us Himself ; that He should make us 
enter into participation of His own nature, of His 
own light, of His own love ; and that, at the end of 
our trial, He should become Himself the object of our 
bliss, by admitting us to the clear vision of His 
beauty and the enjoyment of His infinite goodness. 

This destiny of the reasonable creature to enjoy 
during eternity every happiness of God and to share, 
even during the time of trial, in God's nature and 
faculties, in God's light and love, is what we call the 
supernatural order. 

III. The supernatural order, indeed, with every- 
thing that goes to make it up, is not only infinitely 
above the weak and wounded nature of man, not 



26 



THE LAWS OF PROVIDENCE. 



only above the purest angelic nature and the aspira- 
tions of the sublimest cherub, but it is even beyond 
the most perfect of all the creatures God beholds at 
the summit of the limitless hierarchy of possible 
beings. The lowest act which belongs to this order 
excels the most wondrous of the prodigies of the 
natural order. For these acts, in a very true sense, 
are divine acts. I mean acts divine by communi- 
cation, just as the acts of God Himself are divine by 
nature. 

But it is important to gain a very exact idea of 
this making divine of man, which is the end of all 
the designs of Providence and the summing up of 
the Christian religion. 

Here we pass between two rocks which we 
must shun with equal care ; pantheism, which is the 
exaggeration or rather the diabolical counterfeit of 
the supernatural order, and naturalism, which is its 
negation. We must hold pantheism in abhorrence ; 
but we must not for that feel obliged to share the 
timidity of certain minds who, with every good in- 
tention, lean far too much toward naturalism, through 
fear of dashing against the rock of pantheism. 
Lest they should too closely identify man with God, 
they dare not seriously consider that union which 
God's goodness desires to contract with the wretch- 
edness of man. Through excess of reverence for 
Sovereign Majesty, they do violence to the most 
express words of Sovereign Truth. 

These fears are as unreasonable in their motive 



FIRST LAW OF PROVIDENCE. 



27 



as they are dangerous in their result. That which 
makes the strength of pantheism, that which in every 
age has given it such a power of attraction wherewith 
to fascinate the greatest souls, is its appearance of 
satisfying the desire which God placed in our heart 
when He raised us to the supernatural order. Man 
will cease to dream of his absorption into God, once 
he shall know how easy it is to enter into participa- 
tion with the nature of God. Let us, then, make 
Him know how He is to be made divine by the union 
which constitutes the supernatural order, and then 
He will have only horror for the absurd making 
divine by identity, which constitutes pantheism. 

Order, speaking generally, is the adaptation of 
means to a given end. The end and the means — these 
are the elements of all order; and as the means 
find the reason of their being in the end, it is the end 
which first of all we must endeavor to know in 
order to acquire an exact idea of any order whatever. 

What, then, is the supernatural end of God's 
reasonable creature? We have seen that the natural 
end consists in the knowledge, love, and possession 
of God, in so far as He shows Himself and gives him- 
self to us through His creatures. On the contrary, 
the supernatural end is the knowledge of God seen 
immediately in Himself, by His own light ; it is the 
enjoyment of God loved by His own love ; it is, 
consequently, the possession of God's own happiness. 
For what is it that makes the bliss of God if it be 
not the perfect sight, the infinite love, and the full 



28 



THE LAWS OF PROVIDENCE. 



possession of His own infinite beauty ? Let Him 
communicate this sight, this love, and this possession, 
and He will also communicate His bliss. 

This communication is precisely that which con- 
stitutes the supernatural end. 

The soul which has reached this blessed end no 
longer sees God in creation as in a mirror; she 
does not catch, here and there, scattered glimpses 
of His perfections; she sees Him face to face (i 
Corinthians, xiii. 12) ; she plunges her gaze into the 
very depths of Eternal Light ; she is overwhelmed 
in that ocean which fills with its infinite fulness 
God's own infinite faculties. She enters into the joy 
of her Lord (St. Matthew, xxv. 21); she drinks of 
the torrent of God's pleasure (Psalm xxxv. 9) ; and 
as the understanding and will of necessity reproduce 
in themselves the image of the objects on which 
they fasten, so the soul, all penetrated with the 
splendors of Divine Light and the ardors of Divine 
Charity, becomes in all things like to God (1 St. 
John, iii. 2). She becomes fast bound to Him in 
the bonds of a love as blissful as it is resistless, and 
henceforth she makes with Him but one Spirit (1 
Corinthians, vi. 17). 

Such is the supernatural end. It is the becom- 
ing divine when completed. Between it and panthe- 
ism there is all the distance which separates Divinity 
from nothingness. For pantheism, while it pretends 
to absorb the soul into the Infinite, ends only in the 
soul's annihilation. On the contrary, the super- 



FIRST LAW OF PROVIDENCE. 



29 



natural end causes the soul to preserve her being, her 
personality, her faculties. It is herself that knows, 
that loves, that enjoys : but she knows through 
God's Word, she loves in God's Spirit, and sire 
rejoices in God's bliss. She remains whole and 
entire, and yet God becomes unto her all in all (i 
Corinthians, xv. 28.) She is all in Him as He is 
all in her. She is not God, but she has been made 
divine. She is truly and really admitted to be 
made partaker of the divine nature (2 St. Peter, i. 4). 
It is not because the Divine nature has divided itself 
and come forth from itself to be transformed into the 
nature of the soul. On the contrary, the Divine 
nature has transformed the soul into itself by uniting 
itself to her, whole and entire as she is. 

Such a dignity granted to a creature can only be 
supernatural, utterly and absolutely supernatural. 
It is supernatural for man, the last of a numberless 
species of reasonable beings: it is equally super- 
natural for the most perfect of the pure spirits, for 
the highest of seraphim. It was supernatural for 
Adam in the state of innocence, as it is for his de- 
scendants fallen and guilty. It is supernatural in 
this sense that the forces of our nature cannot reach 
up to it ; but it is also supernatural in the sense that 
our own spirit could never naturally have more than 
a very vague suspicion of its existence, and the 
natural desires of our heart would not draw us toward it. 
Thus St. Paul, after the Prophet Isaias, says : Eye 
hath not seen nor ear heard, neither hath it entered 



30 



THE LAWS OF PROVIDENCE. 



into the heart of maji what things God hath prepared 
for those that love Him (Isaias, lxiv. 4 ; 1 . Corin- 
thians, ii. 9). 

God in no wise owed to us our elevation to 
this end and our privilege to taste this bliss. 
That He has done this is by the freest exercise 
of His own goodness. He had acted freely when 
by creation He gave us our finite being, but He 
has acted not less freely when, by our elevation 
to the supernatural order. He has destined us to 
possess His own infinite Being. The second of these 
gifts is, if it were possible, yet more gratuitous than 
the first. 

IV. But if the supernatural end is purely gra- 
tuitous inasmuch as it is our destiny, it cannot be so 
inasmuch as it is to be our recompense. We had no 
right that God should offer it to us. but once it has 
pleased God to offer it we are bound to acquire it. 
It is an essential law of the free being that he, with 
God, should be author of his own happiness, and 
that he can be glorified by His Creator during eternity 
only inasmuch as he shall have glorified his Creator in 
time. This law will have its application in the super- 
natural order, just as it would have had it in the 
natural order. Equally in both orders the end should 
be a recompense, and must consequently be acquired 
by merit. 

But what means can there be of meriting a share 
in the bliss of God, in the clear vision of His beauty, 
in the enjoyment of His love ? 



FIRST LAW OF PROVIDENCE. 



81 



If merit, to be truly merit, must keep perfect pro- 
portion with the recompense, will it not be necessary 
if man is to merit a Divine end that He should be in 
possession of Divine means ? Beyond all doubt ; and 
for this reason the making divine of man which is to 
be terminated in heaven by glory begins and is per- 
fected here below by grace. Grace, therefore, is the 
seed of glory. The one and the other are made up 
of the same elements; but these elements, which are 
imperfect in the former, reach their perfection only 
in the latter. 

We have said that union with God by glory in- 
cludes the clear sight of God by His own light, union 
with God in virtue of His love, and finally the en- 
joyment of God's own bliss. In grace also we shall 
find these three kinds of union. It, too, will make 
us know God by His own light, that is, by faith ; 
love God with His own love, that is, by charity ; 
it will also make us tend toward God's own 
bliss, by hope. 

But, whereas the light of glory is the sense of 
God present and unveiling Himself entirely, the 
light of faith is the sense of God absent, revealing 
Himself only by His words. And whereas the en- 
joyment of heaven results from a thirst ever burning 
anew for a pleasure which ever satisfies, the hope 
of earth sighs toward that divine bliss without ever 
attaining to it. Finally, whereas the charity of 
heaven embraces the infinite beauty which it loves, 



32 



THE LAWS OF PROVIDENCE. 



the charity of earth loves without yet embracing the 
object of its love. 

In this wise the acts of the theological virtues, 
which are the principal forms of grace, differ from 
those acts by which the blessed soul rejoices in glory, 
only inasmuch as the former strain after their object, 
which is absent, while the latter attain it in its imme- 
diate presence. On the side of the soul the movement 
is the same. Up above, she plunges into the ocean of 
God's goodness, by virtue of that impulse which she 
had gained here below through the exercise of virtue. 
The same love which holds the martyr fast bound on 
the scaffold in the midst of torments, makes him 
taste ineffable delights as soon as death has opened 
to him the gates of heaven. God gives Himself to 
all of the elect according to their capacity for re- 
ceiving Him, but this capacity is different according 
as they have developed it more or less here on earth 
by the exercise of virtue. The more they have in- 
creased here below in their souls, under the in- 
fluences of grace, the hunger and thirst after God, 
the more shall they be filled in heaven. 

Grace then is not only the seed of glory : it is 
also its beginning and its measure. 

By grace as well as by glory the Divinity com- 
municates itself to the soul, but it does not com- 
municate itself under the same aspect. In reality, 
in the inmost life of God there are two distinct as- 
pects : He is at once Infinite Intelligence and In- 



FIRST LAW OF PROVIDENCE. 



33 



finite Truth, Supreme Love and Supreme Goodness, 
Sovereign Activity and Perfect Rest. These two 
elements are equally necessary to His bliss. This 
bliss would not be infinite, did it not consist in the 
infinite satisfaction of an infinite tendency. Yet 
bliss especially consists in the fulness of satisfaction. 
The intensity of the tendency rather constitutes 
holiness. Now, by grace it is under this latter as- 
pect that God communicates Himself to us most of 
all ; He communicates to us His own sense with 
which to know His truth, and His Spirit with which 
to love His beauty. But this truth and this beauty 
He holds still veiled from us and waits for their final 
communication until the twilight of probation has 
given place to the splendors of glory. 

In this way everything is understood ; and the 
Divine life, first of all deposited in the soul as an im- 
perceptible germ, goes on developing itself little by 
little during the whole period of growth, until, 
having reached its full maturity, it produces its own 
fruit, which is eternal bliss. 

On the contrary, there would be a plain dispro- 
portion between the end and the means, supernatural 
merit would be no longer merit and the supernatural 
order itself would be simply disorder, if grace were 
not like glory a true participation in the Divine 
Nat we. 

Accordingly, it is to grace that this qualification 
is given by the Holy Scriptures. The just man of 
the earth, as well as the blessed in heaven, is truly a 

3 



34 



THE LAWS OF PROVIDENCE. 



being made divine ; and this making divine is so real 
and so certain that the holy Doctors rely upon it to 
demonstrate the Divinity of the Holy Ghost, who is 
its Author. Thus St. Cyril of Alexandria asks of the 
Arians : 

"To make divine those beings who in their 
nature have nothing that is divine, is it not neces- 
sary that there should be a higher power than that 
of a simple creature? How can you imagine a 
creature that makes divine? God alone has this 
power, and He exercises it when by His Spirit He 
communicates to holy souls that which He alone pos- 
sesses as His own." 

In virtue of this communication man, who un- 
til then lived only of the animal and reasonable life, 
begins to lead a higher life, the Divine Life. 

This is truly a second birth (St. John, iii. 5). * 
His first existence dates from the day when a spirit- 
ual soul came to vivify his body : he is born a second 
time when the Spirit of God comes to vivify his soul 
(St. John, i. 13). f Henceforth there are in him two 
men that strive the one against the other, as Jacob 
strove with Esau in the womb of Rebecca. One, 

* Amen, Amen, I say unto you, unless a man be born again 
of water and the Holy Ghost he cannot enter into the Kingdom 
of God. 

f As many as received Him He gave them power to be made 
the sons of God, to them that believe in His Name, who are 
born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will 
of man, but of God 



FIRST LAW OF PROVIDENCE. 



35 



the son of man, Esau, is first in order of age ; but 
the second, Jacob, the son of God, the heir of the 
promises, strives to supplant his brother. Like every 
child of Adam, the Christian finds in himself carnal 
instincts which lead him toward the earth. But in 
him these earthly inclinations are combated by in- 
effable desires which lift him unceasingly on high, 
and make him despise the things which pass. 
Henceforth, as in a little world, he gathers together 
in himself and in wondrous harmony all the forces 
which move this immense universe ; forces that are 
physical and chemical and vital and spiritual ; and 
God completes His masterpiece by giving him, with 
His own Spirit, those forces which are divine. This 
Divine Spirit, when it comes to dwell in the soul of 
the Christian, communicates to his intelligence the 
mind of God (i. Corinthians, ii. 16) ; it ponrs 
forth into his heart the charity of God (Romans, v. 
5) ; it becomes the starting point of all his ten- 
dencies, the motive power of all his actions. The 
animal is led by instinct, man is moved by reason, 
the Christian is led by the Spirit of God (Romans, 
viii. 14). It is by the Spirit of God that he judges 
of all things ; by the Spirit of God he prays and 
sends up to Heaven imspeakable groanings, to which 
God cannot remain deaf (Romans, viii. 26, 27). 
The Divine Spirit is for him, as it were, a second 
memory, and suggests to him at seasonable times 
whatever it is needful that he should know (St. John, 
xiv. 26). This Holy Spirit is his Counsel, and 



36 



THE LAWS OF PROVIDENCE. 



guides him by an interior unction which leaves him 
no doubt as to that which he ought to do (i. St. 
John, ii. 27) : the Holy Spirit inspires him, putting 
into his mouth that which he ought to say (St. 
Matthew, x. 20). Hidden in the depths of our cor- 
ruptible nature, as the living germ in the midst of 
the grain of corn, the Holy Spirit causes life to spring 
from the bosom of death, and with unceasing labor 
fashions and transforms to the resemblance of God 
every soul which gives itself up to the Divine action 
(2. Corinthians, iii. 18). We cannot, then, doubt 
this truth : in the weariness of our probation, as 
well as in the blissful repose of our heavenly 
country, the supernatural life is a life truly divine. 
Doubtless, this life does not result from the fusion 
of the created being with the Increate. Also, it 
does not suppose that man is to subsist by a Divine 
personality. What it supposes is that man will act 
divinely. He preserves in all their integrity his 
being, his personality, his own faculties ; but to these 
natural faculties have been joined virtues which are 
as supernatural faculties, and with these virtues God 
Himself comes to unite Himself substantially with 
the Christian, to make him truly a sharer in His 
own nature. 

Therefore, in grace as in glory, there will be 
something created and something uncreated. Just as 
in heaven the blessed souls enlightened by the 
splendors of God's Word receive into themselves a 
light which makes them like to that Divine Sun and 



FIRST LAW OF PROVIDENCE 



37 



capable of union with Him, so on earth the soul 
united by grace to the Holy Ghost receives into 
itself, either by passing impulses or by permanent 
qualities, the influences of this Divine Spirit. But, 
just as in Heaven the light of glory hinders not that 
the union of the soul with the Word of God should 
be immediate, so on earth created grace does not 
prevent the soul from being united immediately with 
the Holy Ghost. 

Let us repeat all this, and would that all Chris- 
tians that read these pages might understand it. No, 
it is not a vain figure of speech — this making of man 
divine which has been shown to us as the end of all 
the designs of the Creator in the present order : it 
is the most real of all realities. The Holy Doctors 
who have received from God a special mission for 
combating errors that relate to the Holy Ghost, 
seem to find no expression strong enough, no com- 
parison apt enough to make us, as it were, touch 
with the hand the closeness of this union by which 
the Holy Spirit communicates itself to the just soul. 
Sometimes they compare it to the union of the per- 
fume with the garment, which it completely pene- 
trates with its own odor; sometimes to the union of 
gold with the viler metals, which it gilds with its 
own sheen ; sometimes to that yet more penetrating 
action by which fire transforms iron and gives it all 
its own properties, ignifies it, in some manner, yet 
without taking from it its nature as iron ; and some- 
times to the communication of all the properties of 



3S 



THE LAWS OF PROVIDENCE. 



wine to the drop of water which is mingled with 
it.* 

These Holy Doctors prove that if this union were 
not substantial in a very real sense, it could not pro- 
duce the effects which are assigned to it. It is to 
deliver us from death and to fill us with the life of 
the Spirit. It is to restore in us the divine image, 
blotted out by sin. Most of all, it is to make us 
become the adopted sons of God. Now such effects 
could not be attributed, they say, to a grace which 
should be separated from the very substance of the 
Holy Ghost. Hence, they conclude that the interior 
dwelling of the Holy Ghost in our souls can alone 
make us enjoy these advantages^ These early Doctors 
surely do not deny that when the Divine Spirit con- 
tracts with the just soul this wondrous union, it pro- 
duces in that soul acts and habits inherent in the 
soul itself and by means of which it is properly con- 
stituted in a supernatural state. Only the followers 
of Luther could say that justification consisted in the 
mere application of God's justice and not in a gift 
inherent in the soul and, consequently, created as is 
the soul. As to Catholic Doctors, they have never 
called in doubt the existence in the just soul of a 
created supernatural light, which is Faith, of a 
created supernatural love, which is Charity : but 

* St. Cyril of Alexandria, I. v. and I. xi., on St. John, VII 
Dialogue; St. Basil, V. against Eunomians ; St. Maximus, Mart., 
II. xxvi. 

f St. Cyril of Alexandria, VII. Dialogue on the Trinity. 



FIRST LAW OF PROVIDENCE. 



39 



what the Holy Fathers have taught, and what we 
ought to admit with them, is, that the supreme dignity 
and exaltation of human nature does not so much 
consist in the reception of these created gifts, how- 
ever precious they may be, as in the possession of 
the very Person of the Holy Ghost Who joins Himself 
to His gifts and by them dwells in us, vivifies us, adopts 
us and makes us divine, and impels us to all kinds of 
good works.* 

* These are the words of Cornelius a Lapide, who, in his 
Commentary on the Prophet Osee, i. 10, gives an admirable 
development, after the Scriptures and Fathers, of the doctrine 
which we have summarized concerning the union of the just soul 
with the Holy Ghost. When, with him, we refer this union to 
the Holy Ghost, rather than to the other Persons of the Divine 
Trinity, we only repeat the unvarying language of the Scripture 
and the Holy Doctors. But we in no wise pretend to separate 
the Holy Ghost from the other Divine Persons, nor to attribute 
to Him any action in the soul which They do not produce 
along with Him. Sound theology could admit nothing like 
this. Moreover, it could never enter into our design to deter- 
mine the part which is proper to this Divine Spirit in the work 
of sanctification, any more than to explain the manner in 
which He was united to just souls before the Incarnation 
of the Word. There is here only question of the making 
divine of the Christian. Now, even those who would maintain 
that in another order a participation of simple resemblance 
could place man in a state truly supernatural and divine, 
cannot deny that the making divine of the Christian consists 
in a real union with the Divinity. That is all we have wished 
to establish in this place. 



40 



THE LAWS OF PROVIDENCE. 



We have thus grasped, in its sublime reality, the 
great end toward which all the designs of Providence 
are directed — the making divine of man and of 
reasonable creatures. To reach this end, God calls 
to His aid all creation. He sends His angels, who 
have no more glorious ministry than the training up 
of souls to prepare them for their heavenly inheri- 
tance. Even material creatures contribute, with all 
their forces, to this great work. St. Paul tells us that 
every creature groaneth and travaileth i?i pain even till 
now (Romans, viii. 22), all being called to co-operate 
in the bringing forth of the children of God. 

How fair the day when this great work of the 
Most High shall at last reach its consummation. 
Then all creation, which man sums up in himself, 
shall by means of man return to that Fountain-Head 
from which it sprung forth. The Infinite, which in 
some way went forth from itself by creating, shall 
then return to itself to rest through all eternity with 
the soul which shall have co-operated in Its designs. 
The Divine circle will be closed. The Divine re- 
semblance shall shine upon the face of creation with 
a perfection beyond compare; for the image shall 
not only be conformed to the Divine Prototype, but 
shall be united to God so as to shine with His own 
light. The whole spiritual creation shall live of the 
divine life, and shall communicate this life to the 
material creation to which it finds itself united in 
man as by a precious link. The Creator, fully glori- 



FIRST LAW OF PROVIDENCE. 



41 



fied by His creature, shall cast back upon the crea- 
ture His own glory. God shall be all in all. 

How sublime are the designs of God, and how 
far are His thoughts above all our conceptions ! How 
lofty are the destinies of man, and how far they sur- 
pass in their true grandeur all the dreams of his pride ! 

Shall we now be astonished that the Church 
raises so high her hopes? She has been commis- 
sioned by the All Powerful to communicate His life 
to man. What help has she not the right to expect 
from Him in the accomplishment of this sublime 
mission ? What are all other interests compared to 
this interest in the eyes of God ? Revolutions of 
empire and calculations of statesmen, the setting up 
and the overthrowing of dynasties — what is it all 
but a little noise that for a moment troubles the nar- 
row sphere of time and shall soon be heard no more? 
And shall not God, Who holds all the happenings of 
time in His hand, know how to make them serve to 
the great work which He has given in charge to His 
Church ? Will He not force her very enemies to co- 
operate in the divine training up of souls whom He 
destines to share His eternal heritage ? 

Clearly, aught else would be impossible. We 
know not yet in what this co-operation consists; but 
this we can say with assurance, that it must be the 
result of all that happens here below. The Church, 
which alone holds in deposit the interests of Heaven, 
equally holds within her hands the destinies of earth. 
God has established her Queen of Eternity. To her 



42 



THE LAWS OF PROVIDENCE. 



He has given Time as a slave. However unmanage- 
able this capricious slave may seem, the Sovereign 
Master will know how to constrain him to help on 
her work and to labor for the Church when he seems 
to revolt most against her. 

It is this which the designs of God reveal to us. 
It remains for us now to study the realization of 
these designs in the world. But here our task be- 
comes more difficult. Scarcely do we turn our eyes 
from the heavens and focus them upon the earth, 
than a dark cloud wraps us round about. Sublime as 
is our destiny, even so our present state is wretched. 
There we see but light, perfection, order, harmony, 
bliss ; here, on the contrary, we see evil under all its 
forms and, most of all, moral evil, that is, sin, the 
essential disorder, the denial of God. How can 
these sad realities be made to accord with destinies 
so splendid? How can the glory of God result from 
all this disorder ? 

Here we are in presence of the most formidable 
problem of the moral order. We do not hesitate to 
look this problem full in the face. The first articles 
of this law of Providence have made us know the end 
set before us. The following articles will help us to 
determine the conditions under which this end must 
be sought. 



FIRST LAW OF PROVIDENCE. 



43 



III. 

The glory of God in the present order is to be the result of a 
probation. 

I. Man's supernatural destiny will be of the 
greatest help to us in drawing forth light from the 
midst of the darkness which envelops the world. 

The moment that Reason in revolt refuses to 
admit this destiny, it becomes impossible for her to 
resolve social problems. 

Indeed, to have some little comprehension of 
the movements which agitate the earth, it is neces- 
sary to look upon it as an immense laboratory, where- 
in day by day the Divine Goodness casts bodies 
kneaded of clay and souls filled with infirmities, that 
they may come forth gods. 

When we look at things from this point of view, 
we understand that so immense a labor, which en- 
dures but a few days and yet has a result that is to 
be eternal, cannot be accomplished without violent 
effort. We are no longer astonished at seeing the 
Divine Goodness fanning the flame of trial which is 
to work this wondrous transformation. We do not 
find it strange that these salutary flames fasten them- 
selves with a kind of fury on the crucible wherein 
created gods are formed — that is, on the Church. 

In fact, if the making divine is the end pur- 
sued by Providence, trial is equally the great means 
by which it attains this end. 

We already understand that between our destiny 



44 



THE LAWS OF PROVIDENCE. 



and that of beings without reason there is this differ- 
ence that, whereas they receive passively their per- 
fection from the munificence of their Creator, we 
must acquire it actively, with His help. To see this 
truth in its completeness, it must be added that we 
are to acquire it freely. 

God, Who might not have created us, freely de- 
termined Himself to give us existence. Freely, 
again, He has called us to share in His own glory. 
Has not He the right to demand that we in our turn 
should glorify Him freely? Even supposing that 
there were no real necessity for Him in this, is it not at 
least supremely meet that He should make us buy at this 
price the happiness which He destines for us? Is it 
not the means of making that liberty, which is the 
most excellent of His gifts, serve to that end which 
is necessary to Him? 

God, therefore, will not admit man from the mo- 
ment of his creation to the enjoyment of the heritage 
which He has destined for him. It is necessary that 
this happiness should be the work of him who is to 
enjoy it. His Creator esteems him too much to treat 
him as a beggar to whom through pity we cast an 
alms. His condition is that of a soldier on whose 
brow is placed, after the battle, the crown won by his 
bravery. This crown shall be so much the more 
glorious for both man and God, as the combat shall 
have been ruderand to srain it the free will shall have 
had more obstacles to overcome. This is why God 
seems to hide Himself here below ; to abandon His 



FIRST LAW OF PROVIDENCE. 



45 



servants to their own weakness while leaving the field 
free to His enemies. This is why human events seem 
to be subjected to no order and to depend only upon 
the tyranny of interest or the caprices of passion. 
It is precisely in this that the probation of the faith- 
ful soldiers of the Most High consists. From this, 
consequently, is to result His glory and theirs. 

By the constancy with which they shall cling to 
Him in spite of the scandals and defections of which 
they may be witnesses ; by the generosity with which 
they shall sacrifice to Him every advantage which 
they might find in staying far away from Him ; by 
the firmness with which they shall bear witness to 
His light in the very midst of obscurities and clouds 
with which their understanding may be surrounded ; 
finally, by the confidence with which they shall give 
themselves up to His Fatherly goodness at the very 
moment when they shall be overwhelmed by trial — 
they shall give to God the greatest glory He can re- 
ceive from His creature, and they shall enable His 
justice to confer on them, as a recompense due to 
their merits, the happiness which His love had pre- 
destined for them, without any merit of their own. 

It is thus Faith explains the seeming disorder 
that reigns in the world. The single word "proba- 
tion" says all, explains all. It is the key of every 
social enigma. The happenings of this world are 
as something writ in cypher, which, to the vulgar 
eye, shows but a disordered collection of capricious 
lines. Only the initiated understand its hidden 



46 



THE LAWS OF PROVIDENCE. 



sense, and are able to discover in this seeming dis- 
order a deep design. Thus the Christian finds 
touching marks of the wisdom and goodness of God 
there where the unbeliever knows how to see only a 
cruel lie given to God's Providence. Those tribula- 
tions, which for the carnal man are but chastisements 
and motives of despair, become for him sources of 
hope from the time when they are shown to him as 
trials. We glory also in tribulations, knowing that 
tribulation worketh patience, and patience trial, and 
trial hope, and hope confoundeth not (Romans, v. 3). 
He compares their brief duration with the everlast- 
ing duration of the reward, and in the infinite dis- 
proportion of these two terms he finds strength not 
only to accept tribulations with patience, but also to 
embrace them with love and joy. / am filled with 
comfort. I exceedingly abound with joy in all our 
tribulation (2 Corinthians, vii. 4). 

The seeming disorders of society will not then 
scandalize the Christian who loses not from sight 
this elementary teaching of his faith. He no longer 
complains of the abandonment of the just man and 
the triumph of God's enemies. He does not take it 
ill that, as the sun shines alike on the good and the 
evil, so too the thunderbolt strikes indifferently the 
cottage of the deserving poor man and the palace of 
the rich usurer. He understands that, if in this life 
God made the separation between good and evil, 
there no longer would be room for trial, and conse- 
quently the end of this life could not be attained. 



FIRST LAW OF PROVIDENCE. 



47 



That which at first sight would seem to be the es- 
tablishment of order would, in reality, be a real 
disorder. 

II. We shall have a still more exact idea of the 
designs of Providence on the world, if we continue 
our examination of this law of trial, not alone as it 
is to all intelligent creatures, but in its application to 
the special condition of humanity. 

Human nature, as we know, is the lowest in the 
hierarchy of intelligent beings, as it is also the first 
in the hierarchy of sensible beings. It is the link 
that unites the material creation to the spiritual cre- 
ation. Below man there is an incalculable number 
of animal species which have, in common with man, 
the faculty of feeling and of moving themselves, but 
are without reason and liberty. In the same way, 
above him Faith shows us, what reason might have 
led us to suspect, a no less incalculable number of 
species of spiritual beings, who have in common with 
him the faculty of knowing truth and loving good, 
but who are without the faculty of feeling, such as 
we have, by corporeal organs. 

This relative inferiority of our nature with rela- 
tion to other spiritual natures ought evidently to 
have for its result to make our probation far more 
painful. On the one hand, our intelligence and our 
will have by themselves much less force for grasping 
tiuth and embracing good. On the other hand, the 
sensitive faculties, whose exercise is inseparable from 



48 



THE LAWS OF PROVIDENCE. 



that of our reasonable faculties, unceasingly draw- 
down the soul to lower things, to temporal good. 

It is, therefore, beyond all comparison more 
difficult for us than for the pure spirits to attach our- 
selves to God with a constancy that cannot be shaken, 
and to render to Him unwaveringly that witness 
which He demands from all His free creatures during 
the time of their probation. 

It is true that, in the first plan of the Creator, 
man was to be freed from the greater number of these 
difficulties. By a privilege which was purely gratui- 
tous and whose transmission to future generations 
was attached to the faithfulness of our first parents, 
we were to be free from ignorance, which is the 
wound of our spirit, and from inordinate desire, 
which is the wound of our heart. Immortal, not lia- 
ble to suffer, absolute monarchs of nature, we were to 
purchase eternal bliss by the lightest of all trials. 
The disobedience of our first parents overthrew 
these merciful designs. It stripped us of all the priv- 
ileges which had been granted to us gratuitously, and 
replaced us in the inferiority and wretchedness of our 
natural condition. 

No doubt we have great right to deplore the fall 
which has so added to the burden of our trial ; but 
we have not the right to see in trial itself an unmixed 
evil. On the contrary, the goodness of God has 
never shown itself with more magnificence than in 
this very excess of our wretchedness. He allows us 
to find therein a glorious compensation for the rela- 



FIRST LAW OF PROVIDENCE. 



49 



tive inferiority of our nature. For if it is true that 
the recompense of eternity is proportionate to the 
probation of time, how can we complain of the rigor 
of this probation ? Have we really the right to mur- 
mur because we have been placed for a few days in 
the lowest rank of the family of the Heavenly Father, 
if we can hope to hold through all eternity in our 
Father's mansion a rank equal to that of our eldest 
brothers ? Thou hast made him a little lesser than the 
angels (Psalm viii. 6). In the resurrection they shall 
be as the angels of God in Heaven (St. Matthew, 
xxii. 30). 

It is true that the result of this special condition 
of humanity is that the number of its elect will be 
comparatively less than in the other species of intelli- 
gent beings. Among the angels, malice alone could 
add to the number of the reprobate. Among men, 
ignorance and weakness mingling with malice, in pro- 
portions which the eye of God alone can discern, join 
together to prevent the execution of the plans of the 
Creator and to turn aside a great number of souls 
from the way of salvation. It is, then, in the bosom 
of humanity that under the most unfavorable condi- 
tions the struggle of good against evil and of Satan 
against God shall take place. But it is just because 
of this that the definite triumph of good over evil, 
which shall crown this long struggle, will be infinitely 
more glorious to God than that which He has won in 
the angelic nature. 

This explains to us the particular dispositions 
4 



50 



THE LAWS OF PROVIDENCE. 



taken by the Almighty to secure this triumph. It 
gives us the reason why the Son of God took our na- 
ture rather than that of the more perfect spirits. As 
a. valiant general, He went forth to the heat of the 
strife. He would combat at the decisive post, there 
where the enemy waged the fight with the greatest 
fury and made use of every advantage. 

But although He has come to our help and has 
placed ready to our hand the most powerful means of 
salvation, He has not wished to take from our in- 
fernal foe any of his resources. He has changed not 
one of the conditions of our destiny. On the con- 
trary, He has only brought out these conditions into 
stronger relief. In the primary plan, the virtue of 
grace would have shone forth in the preservation cf 
a corruptible nature. After sin, its virtue will better 
shine in the regeneration of a corrupted nature. 
Our probation will become more difficult; but also it 
will become more glorious, beyond all measure. 
Where sin abounded grace shall 7nore abound (Ro- 
mans, v. 20). God's wisdom shall draw from igno- 
rance and weakness and lust — the sad fruits of sin 
which shall be transformed into sources of merit — a 
glory which pure spirits could not have given to Him. 

This is the destiny of man inasmuch as it results 
from the primary plan of God, from the overthiowof 
this plan by sin, and from its restoration by the 
Divine Mercy. 

This is the explanation of ail the seeming con- 
tradictions met with in our nature- 



FIRST LAW OF PROVIDENCE. 



51 



Hence the contrast, so strange at first sight, be- 
tween the immense price paid by Divine Mercy for 
man's salvation and the scantiness of* the results. 
Hence the delay experienced in the propagation of 
truth : hence the eclipse of truth in the very midst of 
countries enlightened for centuries by its rays : hence 
the pitiful contrast between the life which the greater 
part of Christians lead and the Faith which they 
profess : hence the illusions and the weaknesses of the 
very Saints. 

These are so many proofs, not of the insuffi- 
ciency of God's grace, but of the immense, the 
remediless weakness of human nature. They are 
consequently like the shadows which, to the eyes of 
an enlightened understanding, only bring out the 
more strongly the glory of the triumph won by grace 
in the bosom of a nature so wretched. 

We are not, then, to leave ourselves to be over- 
come by the weight of our weakness. Let us not 
complain too much of the numberless infirmities 
which, day by day, we discover in ourselves ; and 
of that tendency, so violent, which draws us down 
whenever we would fain rise to heaven. Oh, doubt- 
less it is hard to be thus constantly at strife with self, 
to do each moment that which one would not and 
never to do that which one would. But let us re- 
member that the humiliation which is the result of 
constant defeat, makes up a great part of our merit, 
and is consequently a very solid warrant of our final 
triumph. It was necessary that God's grace should 



52 



THE LAWS OF PROVIDENCE. 



win this kind of triumph and that the Creator should 
receive from His creature this kind of witness. It 
was necessary in the harmony of creation that to the 
praise of strong and perfect creatures should be 
joined the praises of the weak and the imperfect. 
What right have we to complain of the part which 
has been given us, since we know that it contributes 
not less than that of the angels and the very sera- 
phim to the universal harmony, to the glory of God 
and to our own eternal bliss. 

On the contrary, has not man a just reason for 
blessing God, in that his very weakness renders 
his dangers far less great than those of the angels, 
whereas the crown set before him is not less than 
that of the pure spirits ? 

Let us lift up our eyes to Heaven. There shall 
we see in the person of Jesus Christ, in the person 
of Mary, in the person perhaps of many other 
saints, our nature lifted beyond measure above the 
angelic nature. In hell, on the contrary, we have 
every reason to believe that the torments of the wick- 
edest of the damned are beyond measure less than 
those of Satan and his angels. And, moreover, do 
we not know that it is our boundless weakness which 
has been the reason, on God's part, for pouring forth 
mercy without measure, the results of which we can 
know only at the last day. 

Let us then accept with joy the condition given 
us. Let us hold ourselves firm at the post assigned 
us, and think only of doing our best to fight the good 



FIRST LAW OF PROVIDENCE. 



53 



fight. Let us take ourselves as we are. Let us not 
demand for ourselves that which we could demand 
only if we were angels ; and also let us be careful 
not to weigh down by our own fault the burden, 
already heavy enough, of our trial. How much 
lighter this burden would be were there not joined 
to the difficulties of our nature, difficulties immeas- 
urably greater by reason of our resistance to the de- 
signs of God. Let there be an end to this senseless 
resistance. Let us understand the law of probation, 
and do our best to realize it. Then the terrible 
problem of evil will not be for us as for the unbe- 
liever, an insoluble problem, and we shall be in a 
condition bravely to face its obscurity. 



IV. 

Evil as well as good must serve to glorify God. 

Everyone knows that there are two kinds of 
evil : physical evil, which consists in pain or privation, 
and moral evil, which consists in sin, that is to say, 
in the disorder by which a free will prefers pleasure 
to duty and a passing good to infinite good. 

I. That physical evil may serve to God's glory 
and man's happiness, we have already seen. This 
kind of evil is nothing else than the chief matter of 
our probation. 



54 



THE LAWS OF PROVIDENCE. 



Accordingly, we have the right to refer back to 
this evil, as to their chief cause, the glorious results 
which spring, as we have seen, from probation — merit 
in this life and happiness in eternity. Physical evil 
is a bitter root, which bears fruits of incomparable 
sweetness. It is the passing weariness of the combat 
at whose price the soldier purchases the delights of 
victory. Man owes to it in great part the grand 
honor of being along with God the fashioner of his 
own destiny and of co-operating with Him in the 
greatest of the works of the Almighty, the work by 
which he himself becomes divine. 

Physical evil is therefore an evil only in a very 
relative sense. If it is a real evil for the vine to be 
deprived by the husbandman's pruning knife of the 
luxuriant foliage which injures its fruitfulness ; if it is 
an evil for the business man to neglect the cheaper 
merchandise that he may gain what is much more 
profitable; then, too, we may say that physical evil 
is a real evil for the free creature. But if these ac- 
cidental evils are considered by all men as so much 
real good, even with regard to the interests of time, 
how can they be considered otherwise when com- 
pared to the interests of eternity ? 

These things are so evident that we cannot 
conceive how they could ever be seriously denied. 
Everyone sees that the fewer privations there are 
here to endure, the less trial there will be ; and 
the less trial there is, the less merit there will be; 



FIRST LAW OF PROVIDENCE. 



55 



and, last of all, the less merit we can acquire in time, 
the less glory will await us in eternity. 

We might even add to this that to destroy pain 
out of our life would be to destroy that which is 
the greatest charm of the eternal bliss prepared for us 
by God. For the chief charm of the bliss of a free 
creature is that he should freely have conquered, and 
consequently have had something to sacrifice to win it. 

Last of all, the usefulness of physical evil ap- 
pears from another order of considerations. We 
might ask ourselves what, if this evil did not exist, 
would become of the great virtues which at all times 
the human race has held in such high esteem — cour- 
age, fortitude, constancy, heroism ? They would 
disappear, and with their disappearance they would 
deprive all other virtues of their most shining crown 
and all humanity of its chiefest glory. Hence we 
may conclude that among all the dogmas of our holy 
religion this dogma of the usefulness of pain is one 
most clearly according to the light of reason, one 
most honorable to our nature whose noblest energies 
it develops, and one most glorious for our liberty 
which by its showing is called to conquer even the 
possession of God. With all this, it is difficult to 
understand how this dogma should never have been 
so violently attacked as in this century, which pre- 
tends to be so jealous of the rights of liberty, of the 
prerogatives of nature, and of the lights of reason. 

II. But though it is easy to prove the usefulness 
of physical evils, it is not so easy to understand how 



56 



THE LAWS OF PROVIDENCE. 



moral evil can help to glorify God. This, indeed, is 
one of those enigmas which reason could never re- 
solve had not faith come to its aid, and which still 
crush under their weight those who seek its solution 
outside of the teachings of Christian revelation. It 
is the great problem of the age. An eminent writer 
has had no trouble in showing that it is found at the 
bottom of all doctrines which, under the name of 
liberalism or socialism, have upturned society in our 
day. * But for the Christian this problem was long 
ago solved. Besides the solutions of fatalism and 
pantheism, God has wished to give His own, the 
divine solution. We have no need to say that it is 
the only one which satisfies the reason. Although 
we cannot yet present it in its sublime integrity, yet 
from the present point we may understand this much: 
that moral evil is not the work of God, but the result 
of man's revolt ; that God, when He made it possible, 
had in view only the happiness of His creature ; that 
when God permits it, He gives with it the occasion 
of gaining inestimable advantages ; that, last of all, 
when He punishes it, He constrains those who to the 
very end have scorned His mercies, to glorify 
throughout eternity His holiness and His justice. 

Such are the principal heads of doctrine by 
which the Christian theology resolves the problem of 
evil. We shall have no need of treating them at 
great length to grasp their whole bearing and to 

* Donoso Cortes, Essay on Catholicism , Liberalism> and 
Socialism. 



FIRST LAW OF PROVIDENCE. 



57 



scatter the darkness with which this painful problem 
weighs down our minds. 

III. First of all, moral evil is not the work of God, 
but the fruit of man's revolt. This is a consequence 
of the very notion of this evil. For there is no 
moral evil, no sin, except where there is opposition 
between a created will and the moral law ; and the 
moral law is nothing else than the will, free or nec- 
essary, of the Creator. 

God, indeed, since He is Holiness itself and the 
absolute master of His creature in all that He wishes, 
is essentially just; and, consequently, there is no 
holiness and justice for the creature other than in the 
fulfilling of God's will. When, therefore, Calvin 
supposed that God predestined from all eternity cer- 
tain men to do evil just as he predestined certain 
others to do good, he destroyed the very notion of 
good and evil, he justified every crime. He made 
the greatest criminals equal to the greatest saints, 
since the former like the latter equally accomplish, 
according to him, the designs of their Creator and 
the law of their creation. Reason with horror re- 
pels such blasphemies. 

Reason proclaims that God has created all men 
for holiness and that He has given to all the means 
of becoming holy. Only those do evil who, to His 
offence and their own destruction, abuse the liberty 
which He has given them for His service and their 
salvation. 

Let unbelievers, then, cease to set against the 



58 



THE LAWS OF PROVIDENCE. 



goodness of God those men who, according to 
them, do evil only through ignorance of good. If 
such men exist, evil for them is no longer evil — at 
least, it is no longer a moral evil according to the 
true sense of this word. For true moral evil is simply 
the free act by which man knowingly turns away 
from his last end. It consequently supposes the 
knowledge of this end and the knowledge of the ob- 
ligation of tending toward it. The man who should 
be absolutely ignorant of this, even though for every- 
thing else he should be in possession of his reason, 
would not in reality be a moral agent at all ; and 
consequently he would be no more susceptible of 
merit or demerit than a child or an idiot. 

Moral evil then always supposes the possibility 
that it may be avoided. Its gravity is in proportion 
to the degree of light which shines upon the under- 
standing, and the degree of strength with which the 
will is endowed. By what right then can we make 
of its existence a weapon to attack the goodness of 
God? 

It is, some one may say, because this abuse of 
liberty is possible only inasmuch as God has eternally 
foreseen it and freely permitted it. It depended only on 
God, if He so wished, to make evil impossible. Why 
then has He not prevented it ? Why ? 

IV. Because the possibility of evil is, in the 
present order of things, the condition of man' s merit. 

In fact, man's merit, as we have shown, consists 
in preferring the service of God to all the advantages 



FIRST LAW OF PROVIDENCE. 



59 



he might find away from Him. But one of two 
things is necessary. Either it is possible for man to 
attach himself to present advantages, in despite of the 
rights and promises of God, or else this is impossible 
for him. If it is impossible to love created good in 
despite of God, to prefer pleasure to duty, there is no 
merit in preferring duty to pleasure, God to His 
creatures. What merit can there be in doing that 
which it is impossible not to do? If, then, we would 
preserve the merit, the glory, the very reality of this 
choice, it must be that the opposite choice is possible, 
and consequently that man is able to attach himself 
to the creature rather than to the Creator, to pleasure 
rather than to duty. Hence, it follows that for man 
in his present state the possibility of evil is the con- 
dition of the possibility of good, and that to pretend 
to oblige God to prevent the former is to force him 
to destroy the latter, to deprive Him of the greatest 
glory which He can obtain from His reasonable 
creature, and despoil the creature itself of its greatest 
merit. 

V. Let us add to this that the actual permission 
of evil is for man the source of inestimable advantages, 
and furnishes him with matter for the most admirable 
of virtues. 

Physical evils, so to speak, are the only soil 
favorable to the growth of the virtues which the 
world most esteems. But how many other virtues, 
fairer still and more admired of Heaven, find in moral 
evil the condition of their budding forth. Shall we 



60 



THE LAWS OF PROVIDENCE. 



take it ill that the Divine Husbandman should make 
use of very rottenness, to bring forth the fairest 
flowers and the richest harvest ? There is always 
courage, sometimes there is heroism, in the struggle 
against pain. But how much more courage, how 
much more heroism must there not be, to bear up 
under the persecution of injustice, jealousy, hatred, 
ingratitude? to drink, drop by drop, the poison of 
calumny ? to remain alone faithful to the Most High 
amidst the general falling away ? to behold unflinch- 
ingly the triumph of wickedness, and without mur- 
muring to hear its cruel derision ? Where does good- 
ness show itself more generous, sweetness of charac- 
ter more heavenly, patience more admirable, and 
charity more divine, than when these virtues are 
practised, not alone against physical wretchedness, 
but in relation with moral depravity, when they re- 
double their kind attention in proportion as they 
meet with more repulsive harshness? Finally, how 
often does not it happen, that faults forced by passion 
on the weakness of the will become the occasion of 
wonderful repentance, of splendid reparation, of 
heroic devotedness. How many Saints in heaven 
owe to the faults they unhappily have committed and 
generously redeemed, the high degree of glory which 
they enjoy. 

We ask, once for all, are not so many advantages 
motives enough for the Divine Wisdom to permit 
evil ? 

VI. But yet we cannot deny that the evil, which 



FIRST LAW OF PROVIDENCE. 



61 



God permitted only that it might become for its 
authors the source of greater good, may with 
obstinacy hold out against His mercy. Instead of 
giving place to repentance, it may lead to a harden- 
ing of heart which has no remedy. How shall God 
find His glory in resistance so obstinate ? What 
means shall He take to bring into order that free will 
which identifies itself, in a way, with its own dis- 
order ? To this last question, there is, alas, but one 
answer. 

He shall abandon those who abandon Him. 
He will permit disorder to bring forth its own fruit, 
and this is the everlasting wretchedness of those who 
have given themselves up to it. They have freely 
put away the Supreme Good, they have said to Him, 
"Begone from us!" it shall be done to them as 
they have willed ; they shall have the greatest evil, 
and by the pain that this evil shall- cause them to ex- 
perience they shall everlastingly glorify Him whom 
they would not glorify by their happiness. 

This shall be the last means of the All Powerful, 
but this means is unfailing. Truly it would be too 
strange that a creature could thwart its Creator, and 
that nothingness should be able to defeat the designs 
of the Infinite. As I live, saith the Lord, every knee 
shall bow to me and every tongue shall confess to God 
(Romans, xiv. n). We may glorify Him in two 
ways — by repentance and by chastisement. It is for 
us to choose, and it is to make this choice that lib- 
erty has been given to us. 



62 



THE LAWS OF PROVIDENCE. 



But liberty cannot be stretched so far as to ut- 
terly frustrate the designs of our Creator Who has 
made us for His glory. The wise man says : The 
Lord hath made all things for Himself; the wicked, 
also, for the evil day, when he shall be constrained to 
serve as an instrument in the working out of the de- 
signs of his Creator (Proverbs, xvi. 4). If to the 
very end of his time of trial he has been able to re- 
fuse to glorify freely the Divine Goodness, he cannot 
deprive the Divine Justice of its glory from the just 
chastisement it shall inflict upon his faults. 

In heaven he would have proclaimed the infinite 
loveliness of God by the very bliss which he would 
have tasted in the possession of God ; in hell he shall 
proclaim it no less loudly by the pain and despair 
caused by the absence of God. 

In reality, these are two witnesses, equally glo- 
rious for God. As the sun shows itself the source of 
light when in setting it leaves the earth in darkness 
no less than when in rising it floods the horizon with 
its light, so God shall be known as the Supreme 
Good when their loss renders supremely wretched 
those who by their fault are deprived of Him, not less 
than when He renders supremely happy those who 
have merited to possess Him. 

Thus throughout eternity heaven and hell shall 
have but one voice, to confess God's goodness. In 
that wonderful harmony, which the ages shall say 
to the ages, the invisible world and the visible world 
alike, the reprobate by their cries of despair and the 



FIRST LAW OF PROVIDENCE. 



63 



elect by their hymns of joy, shall unite together in 
saying and repeating unceasingly that God is su- 
premely holy, supremely wise, supremely just, and 
supremely good. Then all the outrages which the 
Most High has received here below and which have 
had no reparation by repentance shall be repaired by 
the forced expiation imposed upon their authors. 
Then all the movements which by the abuse of dis- 
ordered liberty to-day oppose His designs, shall be 
brought back to their end, under the resistless im- 
pulse of His justice. The evil of eternal pain shall 
repair by its limitless duration the gravity, which in 
a way is infinite, of the evil of the fault. 

We cannot deny that this teaching scatters a great 
part of the darkness which hinders our discovering, 
in the midst of the confusion round about us, the 
application of the great law according to which 
everything in the world must tend to glorify God. 
However, we are not yet in possession of all the data 
necessary for the complete solution of the problem 
set before us. By the help of the preceding expla- 
nations, we may without difficulty give account to 
ourselves of the individual destinies of men ; but 
we cannot yet pass judgment on the collective desti- 
nies of the peoples and of all humanity. 

We must, therefore, push our study yet further. 
The examination of the last article of this first law 
will perhaps allow us to shed some light on this point 
which remains obscure. 



64 



THE LAWS OF PROVIDENCE. 



V. 

The peoples are to glorify God in their collective and temporal 
existences. 

Before developing the present article, the reader 
should be advised that we do not profess for it, at 
least under all its aspects, so absolute a certainty 
as for the truths which we previously laid down. 

You will find in no decree of the Church under 
this abstract and universal form the proposition which 
we have made. So it is not an article of faith ; but 
it is not difficult to deduce it from a thousand pas- 
sages of the Scriptures and the Holy Fathers, as well 
as from the most accredited authors of the Church. 
They seem to have not the slightest doubt in regard 
to it. On this law St. Augustine and with him Bos- 
suet based their entire magnificent doctrine of the 
Christian philosophy of history. For this purpose, 
moreover, they had only to generalize the designs of 
God as revealed to us by the Prophets, and to extend 
to all people what the Holy Scripture teaches us con- 
cerning the people of Israel and those nations which 
were to be found in contact with it. 

These different nations everywhere appear to us 
as moral persons, whom God recompenses or chas- 
tises because of what they have done collectively, 
just as he recompenses and punishes individuals for 
what they have done individually. 

Beside ail this, the principles we have previously 



FIRST LAW OF PROVIDENCE. 



65 



laid down seem to lead up irresistibly to this 
conclusion. 

In reality, if we admit that all the happenings 
of this world have been ordered or permitted by 
God only with a view to His glory, we cannot deny 
that the most splendid and important among them all 
— those which belong, not to isolated agents, but to 
whole societies — are to attain the same end. Now 
the different societies which make up the human race 
have only a temporal existence. It is therefore in 
time that God is to draw His glory from the fidelity 
with which they work out His designs as well as from 
the resistance which they oppose to Him. The justice 
of this reasoning and the truth of this law will clearly 
result from the following considerations. 

I. What is of first importance for us to under- 
stand is the reality of the fact which we state when 
we say that a people has a collective existence. 

It is true that this fact is a conclusion of com- 
mon sense, and yet a certain amount of reflection is 
necessary to grasp its bearing. Superficial minds 
often reason as if society were not a real thing, but a 
mere fiction of the mind. Doubtless, we do not pretend 
that society is anything distinct and independent from 
the different members which go to make it up, but what 
we do maintain, and what is true is that, when men 
unite together to work out their destiny in common, 
there is a result from this union which is something 
very real, which would not exist if they remained by 

5 



66 



THE LAWS OF PROVIDENCE. 



themselves, — a moral being which has its own des- 
tiny, its own origin, its progress, its decline and its 
death, a body all of whose members, quite apart from 
their personal merit or demerit, share in the merits 
or demerits of the whole society. 

Thus, every man who lives in society has a double 
existence and exercises a double action. He has 
his individual existence and his individual action, for 
which he is alone responsible, alone worthy of praise 
or blame. Moreover, he has a share in the collective 
existence of the nation to which he belongs. He is 
attached to it by his ideas, his affections, his man- 
ners, his interests, and by every element of his physi- 
cal and moral life. He also shares in its prosperity 
and its misfortunes, its glory and its ignominy. We 
are not giving ear to an idle prejudice but to the 
very instinct of our reasonable nature when we are 
proud of the great deeds of our fellow-citizens, 
when we identify ourselves with the successes and 
reverses of those who, hundreds of years since, 
dwelt in the land where we were born. It is not an 
idle prejudice which caused the tears of Jeremias to 
be shed over the smoking ruins of Jerusalem and 
left him no comfort but his groans, even when the 
conqueror showed himself full of kindness in his 
regard. He forgot his individual interest to think 
of the collective interests of that people which he 
looked upon as flesh of his flesh, and which he saw 
dragged away into captivity. He regarded himself as 
buried in that tomb where the glory of Israel lay dead. 



FIRST LAW OF PROVIDENCE. 67 

No doubt this collective existence of a people is 
principally summed up in those who govern it. It is 
they who speak and act in the name of the whole 
society; and as they have a preponderating influence 
in the common work, they have also a heavier 
responsibility. Yet there' is no private citizen who 
has not his share also of responsibility and his share 
of influence in the destinies of his people. Most of 
all in our modern societies, where opinion is so 
powerful, there can be no government so absolute 
that it is not constantly subjected to pressure from 
the thoughts and feelings of those governed. Entire 
nations are therefore really responsible for their 
collective acts. It is they who make war or peace, 
who violate justice or put their arms at the ser- 
vice of right, who defend or attack the Church of 
God. 

II. A second fact we must not lose from sight 
if we wish to understand the ways of Divine Provi- 
dence. This is that the collective existence of a 
people is bound up within the limits of time. This 
fact is yet more evident than the former. It is clear 
that in eternity there will be neither among the 
elect nor among the reprobate any of those boun- 
daries which divide mankind into empires, kingdoms, 
and republics. These distinctions may be useful for 
the maintenance of order on earth, but they have 
only an earthly and temporary purpose. 

Besides all this, experience sufficiently proves that 
the existence of the peoples is bounded by the limits 



68 



THE LAWS OF PROVIDENCE. 



of time. In reality, we see them one after the 
other successively pass through phases which are not 
unlike those of the existence of the individual ; 
along the creeping steps of childhood, in the fire of 
youth, through the period of manly prime, and then, 
sooner or later, in the decline of old age ; last of 
all they disappear from the world's stage. 

III. From the two facts we have just stated this 
conclusion cannot but be drawn, namely, that peoples 
as well as individuals have their own collective du- 
ties. From the fact that they have a collective ac- 
tion, they are obliged to conform their action to the 
eternal rules of justice, and to co-operate in the 
working out of those designs which the Creator has 
manifested to His creature. 

There is no activity in the world which is not 
under rule. There is no power without duty. Even 
the Divine action, independent as it is by nature 
from everything distinct from God, finds in the very 
essence of the Supreme Being an immutable law from 
which it cannot wander. Its infinite power is bound 
by the glorious duty of willing only that which is 
good, and of referring everything to itself. It is 
this common term as well as Their common existence 
which binds together in ineffable society the Three 
Persons of the Divine Trinity. How, then, could 
human societies, which are nothing else than created 
images of this Divine Society, be without law and 
bound by no duty ? 

It is not the place here to say in what these du- 



FIRST LAW OF PROVIDENCE. 



69 



ties consist. The two laws of Providence which we 
are to expound will permit us to determine them 
more distinctly than we could at this moment* 
But the existence of these duties is already manifest. 
We cannot doubt that the glory of God is the end 
of societies, quite as it is the end of individual ex- 
istences.* 

How would it be possible for God not to be the 
end of societies, since He is evidently their begin- 
ning ? Is it not He Who has placed in the hearts of 
men the resistless tendency to unite themselves with 
their fellows ? Is it not He Who has disposed things 
so that they can be born, grow up, and have the ben- 
efit of preservation, only in the midst of society? 

*The reader will have no difficulty in understanding that 
when we say, with all Christian philosophers, that God's glory 
is the end of societies just as it is the end of all things, we 
have no intention of denying that societies have their own 
special end, which is the security of the members that compose 
them and the defence of their rights. These two ends, far 
from being in contradiction, are in perfect harmony with each 
other. Light also has an end of its own, which is to enlighten. 
Does it for that reason cease to tend to God's glory? On the 
contrary, everyone must see that its special end is only the 
application of the common end of things to the special nature 
of light, so that it attains the former by working out the latter, 
and glorifies God by giving light. In the same way, society 
must atone and the same time attain its own end and the univer- 
sal end of all things — it must glorify God by securing the rights 
of its members, and secure the rights of its members by glorify- 
ing God. 



70 



THE LAWS OF PROVIDENCE. 



Society, then, is truly the result of God's will, and 
consequently it must of necessity tend to the es- 
sential aim of God's will, which is simply His 
glory. 

IV. The peoples are subjected to trials collectively. 
It could not be otherwise, for trial is the special con- 
dition, the great duty of the present life. The peo- 
ples wish for glory, and this is right ; for glory is for 
a people a guarantee of its peace and of all the moral 
and material blessings of which peace is the source. 
Let them seek, then, their glory, but let them not 
forget at what price glory must be purchased here 
below. The price of glory is trial, for trial is at 
once the fountain-head of strength, wherein public 
virtues as well as private virtues are steeped ; it is 
the antidote which keeps the social body from cor- 
ruption, the ordinary fruit of prosperity. It is the 
wholesome pressure which raises the moral level of a 
people, and calls forth the devotedness of heroes. 
Last of all, trial faithfully and generously endured, 
is the greatest glory which a nation or an indi- 
vidual can give to God. Why should it not be for 
God the most irresistible motive to glorify a peo- 
ple? Is it not an unchangeable rule of the Eter- 
nal Justice that creatures shall have so much the 
more glory as they shall give more glory to their 
Creator. 

V. From all we have said, it follows that there . 
must be for a people a collective and temporal sanction 
of their collective duties. According as a people 



FIRST LAW OF PROVIDENCE. 



71 



shall accomplish or violate its duty, according as it 
holds firm or yields under trial, God will owe it rec- 
ompense or punishment. 

Here we come to the darkest point of this whole 
discussion. The ways of Providence over the peo- 
ples of the earth are always mysterious, most of all 
when there is question of sanction. We regret that 
no Christian doctor, at least to our knowledge, has 
fully treated this interesting question. Here, as 
elsewhere in our work, we should have been happy 
to go forward with the support of an authority more 
imposing than our own ; but in default of this sup- 
port, we shall strive logically to deduce, by a resist- 
less chain of reasoning, our conclusion from the 
principles which we have just laid down. 

In truth, if there is a law which governs the 
collective actions of a people, that law should have 
a sanction. If societies have duties to fulfil as so- 
cieties, independent of the individual duties of each 
one of their members, they ought also to expect rec- 
ompense or chastisement as societies, independently 
of the recompenses or chastisements which God re- 
serves in His eternity for each of the individual men 
who have observed His law. Whether there is ques- 
tion of societies or individuals, God's wisdom cannot 
suffer Him to impose precepts without furnishing 
them with a sanction which will impel men to ob- 
serve them; and His justice forbids Him to let good 
actions pass without recompense, or bad actions 
without chastisement. But these recompenses which 



72 



THE LAWS OF PROVIDENCE. 



Divine Justice owes to faithful societies, and the 
chastisements which He holds in reserve for un- 
faithful societies, are not to be meted out to them 
during eternity ; for societies, as societies, have no 
existence beyond the bounds of time. There is no 
denying, therefore, that this retribution must be made 
during the course of the centuries. 

Manifestly, therefore, there is a double economy 
of Divine Providence : one which concerns individ- 
uals and has for its field all eternity; the other which 
regards societies and which is carried out in time. 
There is a double judgment of Divine Justice : one 
for each man at the end of his probation, that is to 
say, at his death, when it shall be given to each one 
according to his works; the other for each nation, 
at the end of each period of its history. 

These periods, in reality, are nothing else than 
the time during which the different tendencies of a 
society have had their complete development, reach 
their prime, and cease in order to give place to new 
tendencies. Now, it is evident that if God cannot 
wait to recompense the good tendencies of a society 
until the society has been deprived of its collective 
existence, he also cannot wait until its good tenden- 
cies have given place to evil tendencies. If, then, 
as we have shown, there is a temporal Providence in 
regard to a people, this Providence must exercise its 
judgments especially at the end of every great his- 
toric epoch ; and by these, precisely, the philosoph- 
ical historian will divide, as into so many differ- 



FIRST LAW OF PROVIDENCE. 



73 



ent acts, the great drama of the history of human, 
ity. 

Yet, let us confess it : however clear the law 
may be, its application cannot be made without many 
a difficulty. Surely, nothing is more complicated 
than the problems which attach to the economy of 
Divine Providence toward the various peoples. 

According to Holy Scripture, Justice exalteth a 
people, but sin maketh nations miserable (Proverbs, 
xiv. 34). This is clear, but what is not equally clear 
is the kind and measure of the chastisements by 
which it pleases God's justice to punish the different 
kinds of public iniquities; and it is also not clear 
how to establish the exact balance between social 
virtues and crimes. 

Moreover, in order to pass judgment on the des- 
tinies of a people, we must keep in mind not only 
their own special vocation as a people, but also con- 
sider their mission with regard to the other peoples 
which make up the great society of nations. To a 
guilty society, which of itself might merit nothing 
but chastisement, God may give strength and great- 
ness because of some work which this society is called 
to perform. Thus, the artisan sharpens his tool, not 
for the tool's sake, but because of the work which he 
desires to execute with it, and the advantage he hopes 
from it. 

Yet these different considerations, however cir- 
cumspect they may make us in forming predictions 
for the future., cannot entirely hinder us fromestimat- 



74 



THE LAWS OF PROVIDENCE. 



ing by the light of eternal principles the results of 
facts which happen before our eyes. God's mercy 
has infinite resources, but His justice has also its in- 
violable rights. Certain human virtues, or even the 
accomplishment of certain divine precepts, may win 
for a people a temporal recompense. But if on their 
side iniquity finally prevails over justice, it is impos- 
sible on God's side that chastisement should not 
finally prevail over recompense. The mission con- 
fided by Providence to a people may be a reason for 
delaying the execution of the chastisement it has 
merited, but it cannot delay it forever. When the 
rebellious instrument has wrought the exterior work 
for which God had given it power, the Divine Work- 
man will break it in His hands, and His vengeance 
will be so much the more striking as it has been de- 
layed the longer. 

There is no opposition to be found, therefore, 
between the special destiny of a people and its destiny 
in relation to its neighbors. The designs of God are 
full of unity and harmony. That which should make 
a people just, is precisely that which should make it 
strong; and it is in fulfilling its own vocation that it 
will have solid success in the execution of its mission 
toward the other nations. If it refuses to fulfil its 
own duty, Providence will so dispose events that the 
means given it for carrying out its mission will 
serve to chastise its own unfaithfulness ; and in its 
very success it shall find the beginning of its fall. 



CHAPTER II. 



THE SECOND LAW OF PROVIDENCE : IT IS BY JESUS 
CHRIST THAT GOD WISHES TO BE GLORIFIED IN 
THE WORLD. 

This law is nothing else than the application to 
history of the fundamental dogma of the Christian 
religion. St. Paul has expressed this dogma with 
perfect exactness when he says : There is one God, 
and one Mediator of God and man, the man Christ 
Jesus (1 Timothy, ii. 5), true man as well as true 
God. 

This title of Mediator given to the Word made 
flesh admirably sums up all the designs of God on 
the human race. It makes us understand that through 
Him God wishes to communicate Himself to man, 
and that also through Him man is to be filled with 
the fulness of God (Ephesians, iii. 19). If religion 
is an intercourse of love between God and His crea- 
ture, Jesus Christ in the present order is the only in- 
termediary of this Divine intercourse ; and, wond- 
rous thing, He is not only its intermediary, He is 
likewise its object. For it is He Whom God gives 
unto us; it is through Him that God gives himself 
to us, and gives to us all things ; and it is He also 
Whom we offer up to God, and by Whom we pay 
over abundantly all our debts. His activity has a 
double movement ; it reaches unceasingly from God 

(75) 



76 



THE LAWS OF PROVIDENCE. 



to us, and from us to God. On one side, He brings 
down God to our level ; on the other, He puts us in 
a condition to raise ourselves up to God. While 
His teachings show us the divine truth, His interior 
light makes us capable of grasping the truth. While 
His divine countenance reflects on our weak gaze the 
features of the Divine Beauty, the instinct of His 
Spirit impels our hearts, all carnal as they are, to be- 
come like unto Him. In one word, as in Him God 
has become man, so in Him men are to become di- 
vine. 

All the designs of God, all the dogmas and pre- 
cepts of religion, all the duties and all the hopes of 
men, all the destinies of society, and all the laws of 
history, are included in this saying. To understand 
it, it is enough for us to apply to the God-Man the 
different articles of the law which obliges creatures 
in general and man in particular to glorify their 
Creator. We shall have no trouble in convincing 
ourselves that the Son of God, now that He has be- 
come the Son of man, inherits in every one of these 
relations all the rights of His Eternal Father. 



I. 

The glory of the Incarnate Word is, in the present order, the 
end of all creation. 

I. The fundamental principle of all the legisla- 
tion of Providence, as we have seen, is that all crea- 



SECOND LAW OF PROVIDENCE. 



77 



tures have essentially for their end to glorify God, by 
reproducing in a finite degree His infinite perfections. 
Being the Supreme Beauty, He cannot give to the 
works of His hands any other model than Himself. 
Being the Infinite Love, He cannot create reasonable 
wills otherwise than to be happy in the possession of 
His infinite Goodness. The First Principle of all 
things, He is of necessity their Last End. Now this 
inalienable right of the Creator the Word of God shares 
essentially with His Father, inasmuch as with Him 
He forms one only God. But it is impossible that 
the Word should not inherit this right under a new 
title, when He takes upon Himself a created nature 
and thus becomes the Head and Model of all crea- 
tures. As God, He was already their Last End ; but 
as the Incarnate God, He becomes their End more 
immediately, easier for them to attain, and conse- 
quently harder for them to reject. 

In the present order, therefore, all creatures will 
have for their end to glorify Jesus Christ ; and their 
happiness as well as their perfection will of necessity 
have for its measure the degree of their resemblance 
with Jesus Christ and of their union with His Di- 
vine Heart. 

This, which is evidently true of all creatures in 
general, is still more clearly true of that creature to 
which the Incarnate Word has made Himself nearest 
— that is, to man. How can we doubt that the God- 
Man is in an altogether special manner the end of man? 
By Him the Divine Perfection has been manifested 



78 



THE LAWS OF PROVIDENCE. 



most completely. Is it not, then, by imitating Him 
that we shall be assured of imitating God more per- 
fectly, and consequently of attaining the true end of 
our nature, which consists in glorifying God by the 
imitation of His infinite perfections ? 

Since the Word of God has taken upon Himself 
our nature, there cannot any longer be for us any 
real perfection other than the imitation of this Di- 
vine Model. Jesus Christ, by the very fact that He 
is the Man-God, is also the perfect man, the typical 
man, the man by way of eminence. God, the Father, 
when He gave Him to the world, told us, in a sense 
far different from that in which Pilate said the words 
—"Ecce Homo /" " Behold the Man ! "— " Behold 
the ideal which I have conceived from all eternity, 
and which I call upon all of you to realize, each in 
the measure of his strength." 

It is the essential law of every work to realize 
the ideal of the workman. If the work is inert and 
passive, it is the workman who will take upon him- 
self this realization. He will not cast aside the chisel 
and pencil ; he will not cease to cut and polish and 
correct; he will give himself and give his work no 
repose until he has borne witness to himself that the 
marble or the canvas reproduces the form, expression, 
movement and life of that ideal image which he con- 
templates in himself. 

But man is an active work. He is a picture that 
is to paint itself and make perfect in itself, day by 
day, the resemblance of Him who is at once his 



SECOND LAW OF PROVIDENCE. 



79 



Model and his Author. How can he do this if the 
Divine Model remains shut up in His invisible exist- 
ence, covering His majesty with a dazzling and im- 
penetrable veil ? How shall our eye of flesh penetrate 
into the inaccessible light of the Infinite Intelligence, 
and grasp there the Eternal Ideal after which we have 
been created ? 

God saw our powerlessness, and yet He could 
not resign Himself to leave us in that state of imper- 
fection wherein our nature places us. 

What, then, shall He do? He will Himself 
realize His ideal : He will make incarnate His own 
Word. He will clothe with a nature like unto ours 
that Son, Who is at once the express image of uncre- 
ated beauty and the supreme type of all created 
beauty. By His first creation He has made us to 
His image and likeness ; by this new creation He 
shall Himself be made to our likeness, and He will 
shut up the incomprehensibility of His Divine Form 
under the narrow dimensions of our human form. 
And God said; Let 71s make man to our image and 
likeness (Genesis, i. 26). Jesus Christ, being in the 
form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with 
God, but emptied Himself, taking the form of a ser- 
vant, being ??iade in the likeness of man, and i?i habit 
found as a man (Philippians, ii. 6, 7). 

After all this, He doubtless has the right to im- 
pose on us, without new importunity, the great duty 
which was already imposed on us by our creation, 
viz., to imitate Him in all things, to be perfect as 



80 



THE LAWS 



OF PROVIDENCE. 



He is perfect, and to glorify Him by the visible 
reproduction of His Divine Attributes. This duty 
has nothing that is not easy about it, ever since the 
Divine Perfection has become visible to our eyes of 

flesh, since we have heard we have looked upon 

and our hands have handled the Word of Life (i St. 
John, i. i). 

By conforming ourselves, then, to this Divine 
Mediator, we shall draw near to God. By imitating 
Him, we shall be like unto God. By glorifying Him, 
we shall glorify God. His glory, therefore, con- 
jointly with the glory of God, His Father, is the end 
of all men. 

II. It is not only inasmuch as He manifests to us 
the Divine perfection, that Jesus Christ is revealed to 
us as our end. It is also inasmuch as He includes in 
Himself the complement of our nature. In Him and 
in Him alone, the immense void of this nature, at 
once so rich and so poor, becomes filled. In Him 
alone, we find the accord of those strange contradic- 
tions which make man an impenetrable riddle. With- 
out Jesus Christ, the spirit of man is in necessary 
opposition with his senses ; the activity of the under- 
standing diminishes the strength of the will; interest 
and duty are divided beyond reconciliation, and the 
passions naturally conspire against virtue ; the pleas- 
ure of the present life seems incompatible with the 
happiness of the future life ; and the advantage of the 
individual cannot be reconciled with that of society. 
Even the virtues struggle against virtues. Greatness 



SECOND LAW OF PROVIDENCE. 



81 



of soul will not come into alliance with humility ; 
strength shuts out meekness ; the sensitiveness of a 
loving heart soon tarnishes the sheen of its purity; 
the rashness of intelligence goes on at the cost of 
simplicity of faith. To sum up all in a single word, 
outside of Jesus Christ human nature cannot find 
that harmonious unity which should be at once its 
perfection and its happiness. In its place we see only 
division, rending asunder, strife, weakness, disquiet, 
despair. 

In Jesus Christ, on the contrary, and in all them 
who take Him seriously as their Model, all strife is 
appeased, all contradictions cease, all oppositions are 
reconciled. Look upon the face of this Divine 
Saviour, and then lower your gaze to the Saints who, 
as so many living mirrors, reflect His blessed features. 
See if, in the serenity of their brows, in the shining 
of their eyes, in the sweetness of their lips, every sen- 
timent which makes up the greatness of the human 
soul is not revealed to you in its fairest fulness. A 
divine influence has passed over them, completing 
man by uniting together those things which nature 
seemed to have condemned to an antagonism beyond 
reconciliation. 

The spiritualized senses have become the docile 
instruments of reason. The passions, brought back to 
their true objects, aid virtue in attaining true riches, 
true grandeur, true enjoyment: they cease to be the 
principles of all crimes, to become the sources of 
merit and holiness. The understanding finds in 
6 



82 



THE LAWS OF PROVIDENCE. 



Sovereign Truth the Sovereign Good, and by its own 
development favors the development of the will. 
The assurance of eternally possessing this one object 
of all the aspirations of the soul, and of enjoying it in 
proportion to the sacrifices we have made for it in 
time, indissolubly unites interest to duty, and no 
longer suffers us to separate the happiness of the pres- 
ent life from that of the future life, the advantage of 
the individual from the advantage of society. 

The Heart of Jesus Christ then is the living solu- 
tion of all the enigmas which, without Him, had been 
insoluble. It is the divine unity of the human heart 
which, outside of Him, is divided into many pieces. 
In Him and through Him humility, which turns man 
from seeking grandeur in nothingness and causes him 
to find it in God, joins itself with his loftiest aspira- 
tions; in Him strength tranquilly leans upon God, 
and, having no longer need of violent effort to sustain 
itself, is united to the most attractive sweetness. In 
Him the most affectionate heart finds a delightful ob- 
ject for its sensibility, dispensing it from chasing 
after shameful pleasure, and it becomes so much the 
more capable of loving whatever is lovable as it ac- 
quires greater empire over its animal appetites. In 
Him, last of all, the ardent love of truth makes the 
understanding so much the bolder and more confident 
in research of it, as it is humbler and more teachable 
in accepting it when truth gives itself forth by the 
channel of faith. 

This is man, such as Jesus Christ has made him. 



SECOND LAW OF PROVIDENCE. 



83 



Behold him in his unity, in his perfection, and in his 
serene and unchanging peace ! Before Jesus Christ 
man was an edifice in ruins, whose stones, skilfully 
polished but violently separated one from the other, 
seemed unable ever to be joined together. The plan 
even of this edifice was lost, and the architects who 
tried to reconstruct it succeeded only in mutilating it. 
Jesus Christ came, and He has shown us in Himself 
the divine edifice reconstructed with a splendor 
such as it never had before. Henceforward it de- 
pends only on ourselves to find in Him that unity 
which we would seek vainly outside of Him. 

III. Jesus Christ in reality is not only the per- 
fection of humanity in general, He is also the per- 
fection of each man in particular. 

When we come into the world, we are all 
strangely incomplete. Nature contents herself with 
giving the rude outline, to leave to our free activity 
the merit of perfecting ourselves. Accordingly, in 
the natural disposition of each man there are gaps 
and corners, qualities and defects. To develop the 
qualities and to correct the defects, to smooth down 
the corners and fill up the gaps, this is the work of 
the present life. But to accomplish this work we 
have need of a rule. Unless a model is given us, we 
shall be in great danger of taking for virtue that 
which is defect and of exaggerating monstrously 
those points which we should have rubbed away. 
Seek where you will such a model, practicable for 
every mind and any courage, greater than the great- 



84 



THE LAWS OF PROVIDENCE, 



est, yet not beyond the reach of the lowest, a model 
which shall reveal all perfection to all and, while 
it reveals, shall make perfection amiable — and you 
shall not find it outside of Jesus Christ. But in Jesus 
Christ you will find it, and if you are sincere you will 
demand no other proof of the divinity of this ador- 
able Saviour. Yes, He is your Model ! Would you 
know what is wanting to you and what you have in 
excess? Measure yourself on the model of Jesus 
Christ. Would you find the unity of your being, 
which is now scattered in a thousand ways? Com- 
pare each part of it with the corresponding being of 
Jesus Christ, and you shall find the place of each fac- 
ulty, the direction to give to each movement. You 
shall find order, and with order perfection, peace, 
true happiness. 

IV. The conclusion of all that we have said is 
that for man Jesus Christ is the principle of a pro- 
gress truly without limit. 

It is evident that the first condition of serious 
progress is to put an end to the inward strife which 
stops us in our way, impedes us, and degrades us. 
But the moment that peace has been established 
within us, the moment that our powers are closely 
united in the pursuit of our true perfection, what 
then shall stay our progress? What power on earth 
or in hell shall be able to put a limit to it? Is not 
the goal of this progress the very Infinite, the Infinite 
Truth to know, and the Infinite Good to love, to 
imitate and to reproduce ? Now, so long as we are 



SECOND LAW OF PROVIDENCE. 



85 



on this earth, where God has placed us only that we 
may grow unceasingly, shall we not be able always 
to find in this exhaustless mine new riches to gain ? 
Our destiny is really and truly to become like unto 
Jesus Christ in our understanding, in our will, in ail 
the powers of our soul, in the very senses of our 
body, in our relations with our fellows and with na- 
ture. To work out this destiny we have the all-pow- 
erful grace of Jesus Christ. What, then, is the 
progress, intellectual, moral, social, artistic — indus- 
trial, even, and material — which the faithful working 
out of this glorious destiny does not render easy ? 

On the other hand, without Jesus Christ is it 
not easy to see that every kind of progress is so much 
the more difficult as it is more important and more 
according to the divine dignity of our nature ? Moral 
progress is more difficult than scientific progress, 
scientific progress than progress in the arts, progress 
in the arts than industrial progress. And not only 
the elements of human progress go on decreasing in 
proportion to their elevation in dignity, but they 
contradict and destroy each other mutually. Mate- 
rial progress, which is the least noble of all, unfail- 
ingly draws after it moral decadence. Man loses on 
the side of the spirit in proportion as he gains on the 
side of physical nature. And the enemies of Jesus 
Christ are themselves forced to deplore this degrada- 
tion, of which their hostility against the Man-God is 
the principal cause. 

When we leave this Divine Mediator, every con- 



86 



THE LAWS OF PROVIDENCE. 



dition of progress slips from us. We are no longer 
in agreement as to the end whither we ought to tend, 
nor the way which we should follow. In constructing 
theories of progress, we lose that time of life which 
should be employed in realizing it. We dispute over 
vain speculations instead of helping each other by 
fruitful activity, and we go so much the further away 
from true progress as we have its name the more con- 
tinually on our lips. Blind that we are, we obsti- 
nately seek in the region of chimeras what God 
eighteen centuries ago sent down to us from heaven. 

We must indeed confess it : in the midst of all 
the objects of displeasure which poor humanity pre- 
sents to us, there is nothing fitter to cause repugnance 
in an upright and generous soul than the shameless 
folly of the men who make war on Jesus Christ in 
the name of human nature and of progress. What ! 
Defend the rights of human progress against Him 
Who said to men, Be ye perfect as your Heavenly 
Father is perfect ! against Him Who has promised 
to make us masters of ourselves, of the world and of 
nature, and Who has so gloriously accomplished His 
promise in the person of all those who were willing 
to take it seriously ! against the Man-God Who, as 
He ascended to eternal glory by the way of the most 
heroic virtue, invited us to walk in His steps and 
assured us all that when we should conquer, as He 
did, He would make us to sit upon His throne ! de- 
fend the dignity of human nature against Him in 
Whom it has been really and eternally made divine ! 



SECOND LAW OF PROVIDENCE. 



87 



And what is it, then, which they offer to human 
nature — these men who make themselves its pro- 
tectors? What do they offer it in recompense of the 
Divine destiny of which they deprive it ? What do 
they offer it in exchange for that blessed unity which 
it has found in Jesus Christ? Ah, we know but too 
well. It is not difficult for us to measure the con- 
quests of these powerful geniuses, and to weigh what 
they have added to the ignoble inheritance of rever- 
ies, doubts, contradictions, ignominies, which had 
been bequeathed to them by paganism. There is a 
certain industrial progress, which is by no means the 
fruit of their theories, but which their theories can 
only render disastrous. Apart from this, everything 
is pure paganism — paganism with its contradictory 
systems for the use of philosophers, and its gross ma- 
terialism for the use of the masses. This is the goal 
set before us by our modern criers of progress. They 
pretend to make us advance by sending us back nine- 
teen centuries. They propose to free us from the 
slavery of faith by bringing us down from the sun- 
light of certainty into the darkness of doubt, and 
from the serene regions of spirit into the mire of ma- 
terial interests. 

For more than one hundred years society has 
listened to them and sacrificed to them all which 
during eighteen centuries had made its force, its union, 
its happiness. No, let us repeat, there is on this 
earth no more distasteful spectacle. Vice itself, in 
its most brutal fury, is not more revolting than this 



88 



THE LAWS OF PROVIDENCE. 



set purpose to tear from humanity all its glories, and 
to stay the pouring forth of the Divine goodness, 
which without this criminal resistance would long 
since have flooded the earth. 



ii. 



In the present order, the making divine of man is to be wrought 
out by Jesus Christ. 

I. We have been studying one of the principal 
aspects of the mediatorship of Jesus Christ. We have 
seen how He inherits, by the union of His human 
nature with the person of the Eternal Word, the title 
of Last End, which is the essential attribute of God. 

We must now push further still the study of our 
relations with this Divine Mediator. We have been 
forced to apply to Him the fundamental principle of 
our first law of Providence, which obliges all crea- 
tures, but most of all beings endowed with reason, to 
glorify God by imitating His infinite perfection. 
Can we as well apply to Him the second article of 
this same law, according to which the glorification 
of God in the present order is to result from the 
making divine of man? 

Yes, assuredly we can do so ; for Jesus Christ 
not only possesses the perfection of our nature, He 
also possesses the fulness of the Divinity, and He 



SECOND LAW OF PROVIDENCE. 



89 



possesses it only in order that He may communicate 
it to us. When God became man, He intended not 
only to make man complete ; most of all He had it 
in view to make man divine. He is truly for hu- 
manity the type of all perfection — the goal of all 
true progress. But He is more than that. He lifts us 
up to a perfection infinitely above the powers and 
demands of our natural condition. He is the model 
and the supreme mover of the world of matter and 
the world of spirits ; but, more than all this, He is 
the beginning and the end of the supernatural order. 
By the very act by which He took upon Himself our 
wretched nature, He communicates to it His divine 
life. He is not only the Model Man, but He is also 
the Head of humanity become divine. 

In truth, when the Word of God became incar- 
nate, He designed not to limit the communication of 
His Divinity to one single body and one single soul. 
The counsels of His love had a far wider scope. They 
embraced the whole world. It was human nature, 
whole and entire, and with it the angelic nature which 
He desired to unite with the Divine Nature. 

Just as man composed of mind and body is the 
living bond between the spiritual and material crea- 
tion, so the Incarnate Word, ineffably compounded 
of body and soul and a Divine Person, shall hence- 
forth be the bond and living link between cre- 
ated and uncreated existence. And yet more, He 
shall be the head and heart whence the divine life 



90 



THE LAWS OF PROVIDENCE. 



shall be poured forth on every order of reasonable 
creatures. 

It is true there will be but one single individual 
nature which, by its union with the Son of God, 
shall be without a created personality and subsist in 
a divine personality, and which consequently can be 
called God. But all other individual natures be- 
longing to the race of Adam shall be called to unite 
themselves to this privileged nature, and to receive 
by this union a very real communication of its divine 
life. There shall be but one only Man-God ; but all 
men who shall be willing to accept the influence of 
the Man-God shall be enabled to become divine men, 
to perform in Him divine acts, and through Him to 
attain to divine bliss. There shall be one only Son 
of Adam who can glory in being the only and the 
natural Son of the Heavenly Father ; but all those 
who shall be willing to receive this only Son shall 
become thereby the adopted sons of His Father and 
shall acquire a strict right to share in His heavenly 
inheritance. As many as received Him, He gave 
them power to be made the sons of God (St. John, i. 
12). If sons heirs also; heirs indeed of God and 
joint heirs with Christ (Romans, viii. 17). ■ 

II. The better to understand this close relation 
which unites Jesus Christ with the reasonable crea- 
tion and makes of Him the Head of angels and of 
men, we must remember that the human nature of 
our Divine Saviour is united to the divinity by a 
double bond. It is, first of all, united by the hypo- 



SECOND LAW OF PROVIDENCE. 



91 



static union to the Person of the Eternal Word, 
which communicates to it its subsistence. But it is 
moreover united to the Person of the Holy Spirit by 
that union whose nature and effects we have already 
described, and this union is realized in Jesus Christ 
to a degree which no creature, angelic or human, has 
ever approached.* 

In virtue of the first of these unions, Jesus Christ 
— man — is truly God, and the actions of His human- 
ity are consequently the actions of God. These ac- 
tions properly belong to the Eternal Word of God, 
and they receive from Him an infinite value. But, 
in virtue of the union of the holy soul of our Saviour 
with the Divine Spirit through sanctifying grace, the 
actions of this holy soul are divine by a new title. 
How would it be possible to doubt that the Holy 
Ghost shows forth in Jesus Christ, in its fullest meas- 
ure, that virtue which is His for sanctifying and 
making divine the created faculties to which He 
unites Himself? Fire can penetrate with its heat and 
light the densest metal ; and with what dazzling splen- 
dor, with what enkindling heat, shall not the Spirit 
fill that intelligence and that will to which the Word 
of God, by uniting Himself to them, has already 
given an infinite dignity ? St. John the Evangelist 

*It is hardly necessary to repeat here what we have already 
said in a former note — that we profess to attribute to the Holy 
Spirit, in that union whose bond is sanctifying grace, no other 
share than that which is assigned Him by the Holy Scripture 
and all Catholic Doctors. _ 



92 



THE LAWS OF PROVIDENCE. 



thus describes to us in sublime words the prerogatives 
of the Word made flesh : We saw His glory, he says. 
What was this glory? The glory as it were of the 
Only Begotten of the Father ; full of grace and truth 
(St. John, i. 14). Before him St. John the Baptist had 
not only declared, but proved by the clearest of reason- 
ing how necessary is this connection between the two 
unions of which we speak. He said to his disciples : He 
whom God hath sent speaketh the words of God ; for 
God doth not give the Spirit by measure. The Father 
loveth the Son, and He hath given all things into His 
hand (St. John, iii. 34, 35). It is as if he said — 
When God the Father unites the person of His Son 
with a human nature, He cannot restrain Himself 
from giving to this privileged nature all that belongs 
to Himself, and consequently His Spirit which is the 
first of His gifts. 

In the same way therefore, as we cannot call in 
doubt the reality of the personal union of the Word 
of God with the human nature of Jesus Christ, so 
we cannot hesitate to acknowledge the reality of this 
other union, which is not now personal, but substan- 
tial — the union which sanctifying grace establishes 
between the holy soul of our Saviour and the Divine 
Spirit. 

Now, of these two unions, there is one which 
Jesus Christ possesses as His own and which he com- 
municates to none. It is the former — that by which 
He is God. The second is this union with the Holy 
Spirit, which would suffice, as we have seen, to make 



SECOND LAW OF PROVIDENCE. 



93 



His works divine works. This He not only consents 
to communicate to us, but He makes it a strict duty 
for us to receive the communication of it, and His 
Incarnation has no other end or aim. 

In Him, then, the Holy Ghost has been poured 
out without measure ; but from Him the Holy Ghost 
is to be poured forth on all men, just as the blood is 
sent forth from the heart into all the members. Be- 
cause you are sons, God hath sent the Spirit of His Son 
into your hearts (Galatians, iv. 6). In His quality as 
only Son of the Father, He possesses the fulness of 
grace ; but we, as His adoptive sons, are to receive of 
His fulness (St. John, i. 14, 16). He alone knows 
God by His own light; but through Him we are 
called to know God, even as He knows Him. No 
man hath seen God at any lime. The Only Begotten 
Son Who is in the Bosom of the Father, He hath de- 
clared Him (St. John, i. 18). He alone has the right 
to call God by the name of Father ; but we, when we 
receive His Spirit, learn to call God by the same 
name, and we gain the right of being heard, even as 
He is heard. For the Spirit Himself giveth testimony 
lo our spirit that we are the sons of God. Likewise 
the Spirit also helpeth our infirmity : for we know not 
what we should pray for as we ought, but the Spirit 
Himself asketh for us, with unutterable groanings. and 
He that searcheth the hearts knoweth what the Spirit 
desireth, because He asketh for the saints according to 
God (Romans, viii. 26-7). 

III. Jesus Christ is, therefore, in a very real sense, 



94 



THE LAWS OF PROVIDENCE. 



the Head of humanity and of the whole spiritual crea- 
tion : for from Him alone does the Divine life pour 
itself forth on angels and men, as really as animal life 
spreads from the head into every part of our body. 
From Him and from Him alone proceed all super- 
natural acts which are done in heaven and earth. 
We cannot acquire the least merit, do the least action, 
conceive the least thought, pronounce the least word, 
in the supernatural order, if these different move- 
ments are not in our hearts through an impulse of 
His Divine Heart. This Adorable Heart is for all 
humanity, in the order of grace, what the sun, in 
the physical order, is for the earth and the other 
planets which gravitate around it. The sun of itself 
has neither light nor heat, but it is the centre where 
light and heat are gathered in their fulness, and 
whence they are poured forth with exhaustless 
fecundity. Thus the Heart of Jesus is not grace, but 
it is the centre and exhaustless fountain-head of grace. 
Light and heat existed before the sun, but once the 
sun was created they were centred in it as the waters 
are centred in the immense ocean bed, and hence- 
forth they fecundate only those lands which the sun 
visits with his rays. In the same way, grace existed 
in the world before Jesus Christ ; but since Jesus 
Christ is born, He has become its only channel, and 
no souls are made fruitful of salvation except those 
who are submitted to His divine influence. Even 
before His birth He was the end and the meritorious 



SECOND LAW OF PROVIDENCE. 



95 



cause of the supernatural order ; since His coming 
He is moreover its Head and supreme Moderator. 

Really, then, by Him and by Him alone can we 
work out our glorious destiny. In Him alone can 
we become divine by merit on earth, as in Him alone 
can we become divine in heaven by sovereign bliss; 
and all the glory that God draws from this two-fold 
making divine of his reasonable creatures he shares 
with the sacred humanity of Jesus Christ. 

This second aspect of the mission of the Divine 
Mediator lights up and wonderfully completes the 
first. We understand far better how Jesus Christ, 
with God His Father, is the end of humanity, when 
we consider Him as the Head whence the divine life 
is spread abroad throughout this great body. This 
divine life which He communicates to us has not only 
a distant resemblance to God, but it is a real partici- 
pation in His nature; it gives a splendor greater be- 
yond compare to the glory of the Father, whence it 
flows, and of the Son, by Whom it is communicated 
to us, than any natural perfection even though raised 
to its highest degree. 

On the other hand, our nature finds in its union 
with this Divine Head the superabundant satisfaction 
of all its needs and the infinite realization of its most 
daring dreams. Man naturally thirsts for the Infinite, 
and what has he not done to satisfy this thirst ? His 
whole existence has been from the beginning, as St. 
Paul expresses it, one series of efforts to attain to the 
Infinite, which by its spirituality was always escaping 



96 



THE LAWS OF PROVIDENCE. 



from his grasp, though always present by its immen- 
sity. He hath made of one all mankind to dwell upon 

the whole face of the earth that they should seek 

God, if happily they may feel after Hint or find Him, 
although He be not far from every one of us (Acts xvii. 
26, 27). Therefore man could appease the sublime 
impulse within him only by absurd idolatries or the 
dreams of pantheism. By idolatry he strove to make 
God human, but he succeeded only in stripping Him 
of His divinity. By pantheism on the contrary he 
believed that he could make man divine, but he 
reached his end only by annihilating humanity. On 
either side, his efforts to unite the infinite and the 
finite were equally sterile, and served only to establish 
at once the height of his own vocation and the depth 
of his fall. But these resistless tendencies toward 
the Infinite which without Jesus Christ ended only in 
absurdity and crime, Jesus Christ has shown realized 
in His own Person, in regard to our common nature ; 
and He puts each man in condition to realize them 
in himself. In Jesus Christ God being substantially 
united to our nature by the Incarnation, gives Him- 
self, all and entire, to each man by His grace and 
offers to make ail blessed with Him in glory. 

It is really in glory that the Incarnate Word 
fully accomplishes His task as Head of regenerate hu- 
manity. This mission of His shall be consummated 
only when all the elements destined to form a part 
of this body, having passed through the trials of 
time, shall be united with their Head in their true 



SECOND LAW OF PROVIDENCE. 



97 



country. Then from Head to members life shall 
flow without hindrance and without other measure 
than the degree of their union with Him. Then He 
shall communicate to them the light of the Word 
which is His own, and by it He shall make them 
capable of seeing, as He sees, the Divine Essence. 
Then, too, He shall communicate to them the Spirit 
of God Which belongs equally to Him, inasmuch as 
he produces It conjointly with His Father. By this 
Spirit He shall make them able to love God as He 
loves Him, and consequently to taste as He tastes 
the bliss of God. It is then that God shall be all in 
all, for in that society of the elect there shall be but 
one only object, the Essence of God ; one only light, 
the Word of God ; one only spirit, the Spirit of 
God ; one only body, the Body of God. 

IV. While waiting for this blessed and ineffable 
communion of eternity, our Divine Head has estab- 
lished for us on earth a complete apparatus of means 
designed to bring closer and closer the bonds which 
unite Him with His members. These wonderful pro- 
cesses of making divine, by which Jesus Christ com- 
municates Himself to each man even as He com- 
municated Himself by His Incarnation to all human- 
ity, are the Sacraments. Between the Incarnation 
and the Sacraments there is perfect correspondence. 
As by the former the Divinity united Itself with a 
corporeal nature in order that it might be visible to 
men and become the bond of a visible society among 
them, so by the Sacraments invisible and supernatural 
7 



98 



THE LAWS OF PROVIDENCE. 



grace is united to a material sign ; and in this way 
it can be visibly transmitted from one member to 
another of the human society. Already, in the 
natural order, the world of bodies had for its plain 
mission to symbolize and aid the operations of spirits; 
the corporeal light is at once the image and the aid 
of the natural light of reason. The Sacraments trans- 
fer this wondrous analogy to the supernatural order. 
They are at once a sign and a cause ; they express 
the wonderful effects of grace on souls, and they aid 
in the production of these effects. The water of 
baptism is the image and the instrument of the puri- 
fication of souls ; the holy oil with which the young 
Christian's forehead and the hands of the future 
priest as well as the limbs of the dying faithful are 
anointed, is the mark and the channel of the strength 
with which their soul is clothed in order to fight the 
battle of God. Thus the Christian, who by his 
baptism has been grafted upon the Divine Tree, more 
and more becomes filled with its life. 

But the great process of making divine, the Sac- 
rament by way of eminence, the perfect extension of 
the Incarnation to each man, is the Holy Eucharist. 
Through it our Divine Head not only pours forth 
His influence upon His members, He communicates 
with them. That is to say, He unites himself whole 
and entire to them and unites them whole and en- 
tirely to Him. He does this with a perfection greater 
beyond compare than the first head of humanity 
could have done for his descendants. The flesh of 



SECOND LAW OF PROVIDENCE. 



99 



Adam, had he remained in holiness, would have been 
the channel of grace, so that he would have communi- 
cated the supernatural life to us by the same act by 
which he communicated to us our natural life. Jesus 
Christ, the Head of regenerate humanity, does this 
and much more than this. He too makes of His divine 
flesh the channel of the Spirit. But whereas the 
flesh of Adam would have been for his descendants 
only an occasion of grace, the adorable flesh of Jesus 
Christ effectively causes grace. Whereas Adam pos- 
sessed grace only in measure, Jesus Christ possesses it 
in its fulness and can bestow it on each one accord- 
ing to the extent of his needs. Last of all, whereas 
Adam would have given us his life but once, Jesus 
Christ gives His life unto us as often as it pleases us 
to ask it of Him. What harmony is there in this 
mystery, what light bursts forth from its adorable ob- 
scurity ! If someone accused us of taking too liter- 
ally what Scripture and tradition teach us concerning 
man's becoming divine, to refute this accusation we 
should only need to point to the Divine Eucharist. 
No one will deny that there at least the Divinity gives 
Himself to us very really and very substantially. But 
if the end and aim of the supernatural order was not 
the very real becoming divine of man, if this order 
tended only to the production of a purely created 
quality, could we conceive that God would have 
chosen as the means to such an end this daily renewed 
gift of His own Son? Would it not cast a doubt on 



100 



THE LAWS OF PROVIDENCE. 



His wisdom to suppose Him capable of thus throw- 
ing out the pure gold of His divinity only to obtain 
a result of infinitely less value ? 

On the contrary let us take seriously this partici- 
pation in His nature which God presents to us as the 
end of the supernatural order. Henceforth this 
order will appear to us in its enchanting harmony. 
We shall understand the Incarnation by which the 
Divinity has communicated itself fully to a nature 
sprung from Adam, through that nature to pour itself 
forth on all humanity. We shall understand the 
Sacraments, the visible channels through which in- 
visible grace is conferred on beings who are them- 
selves composed of a visible body and an invisible 
spirit. We shall especially understand the Eucha- 
rist, bringing to each man that grace which through 
the Incarnation was brought down to all humanity. 
The Eucharist is the Divine food which is destined 
unceasingly to restore a nature whose native weakness 
causes it unceasingly to faint and fail, and to renew, 
by virtue of a flesh that makes alive, the strength of 
a soul whose union with a corrupt body would not 
fail to deaden. In this communion Jesus Christ, 
without division, gives himself whole and entire to 
all those who receive Him. Thus He unites all to- 
gether in the unity of His own being to make of 
them but one and the same body, even as His Holy 
Spirit Who is present in all makes of all but one 
single spirit. In this we may contemplate with en- 



SECOND LAW OF PROVIDENCE. 101 

raptured minds the image and the beginning of the 
blissful communion of eternity.* 



III. 

The glory of God, of Jesus Christ, and of man himself, in the 
present order, is to result from the imitation of the suffer- 
ings of the Man-God. 

If the Divine Mediator inherits all the rights of 
God His Father toward us, it must be that His glory, 
like that of God His Father, should be the outcome 
of our trials ; and that the third article of the first 
law of Providence should be reproduced in that 
law which obliges us to give Him all that we owe to 
God. 

* To grasp in all its sublimity the Providential plan of the mak- 
ing divine of man by the Man-God, it would be necessary to read 
the commentaries on St. John by St. Cyril of Alexandria and 
his different treatises against the Nestorians and the Macedo- 
nians. Petavius has justly remarked that this great Doctor seems 
to have received from God the special mission of bringing out 
in its full light that double union which it has pleased the Di- 
vinity to enter upon with our nature — the union of the Word 
with the humanity of Jesus Christ and the union of the Holy 
Ghost with the souls of Christians. We will refer to but a sin- 
gle passage where he sums up with perfect clearness this won- 
derful doctrine. He is commenting on these words of the 
prayer of our Lord after the Supper. "Not for them only do I 
pray but for them also who through their word shall believe in 
Me, that they all may be one, as Thou Father in Me and I in 
Thee, that they also may be one in Us " (St. John, xvii. 21). 



102 



THE LAWS OF PROVIDENCE. 



Henceforth His mission will appear to us in a 
quite different light. We have seen Him in His 
grandeur, we shall now see Him in His abasement. 
Wonderful thing ! From the very midst of this 
abasement we shall see springing forth a glory more 
touching than all the splendor of His power. Yes, 
the most consoling side of the work of our Divine 
Saviour is that He has willed to take upon Himself 
all that which in our trials was bitterest and most 
humiliating. 

After becoming our Head and our Life, He has 
willed to become our Guide and our Way. It was 
not enough for Him to furnish us in His grace the 
means of becoming divine. He has wished, more- 
over, to show us by His example how we are to use 
this means. It would be little that He should make 
us like to Him by communicating to us His fulness, 
had He not likened Himself to us by taking upon 
Himself our need. His love demanded this com- 
plete likeness. The Heart of Jesus has never been 
able to resist the demands of love. 

In truth, where can we find the law of trial 
more completely realized than in the person of Jesus 
Christ ? His entire life from Bethlehem to Calvary 
was but one uninterrupted trial, crowned by the 
supreme trial of all in His most cruel death. Every ad- 
vantage, every glory, every joy which was due Him 
by right of birth He freely renounced through love 
of us, that we might learn to sacrifice for love of God 
advantages and glories and earthly joys which might 



SECOND LAW OF PROVIDENCE. 



103 



tend to draw us away from Him. Every privation, 
every weakness, every sorrow, He has freely under- 
gone in order to teach us, not only not to fear them, 
but to embrace them and love them and long for 
them. 

Let us stop to admire the means which was the 
invention of His love in order that our trials might 
cease to frighten us and might seem lovable to us. 

Is it not true that all which He took upon Him- 
self became divine and acquired the power of making 
divine? His humanity whole and entire and each 
of its parts, His soul and His body, are all divine 
by their union with Divinity and make divine all 
that they touch. If then He takes upon Himself our 
trials, they too shall become divine ; and they shall 
acquire the virtue of making us divine. 

Therefore He shall take them to Himself, He 
shall make of th:m His inseparable companions. 
They shall clothe Him roundabout as with a man- 
tle, they shall be his daily bread. He shall taste 
all their bitterness, and the Prophet shall be able 
to sum up in two words His entire existence, call- 
ing Him the Man of sorrows and acquainted with 
infirmity (Isaias, liii. 3). 

Henceforward in the language of regenerate 
humanity trial shall change its name. It shall be 
called the Cross, a divine name which makes it clear 
and lightsome, so that through the darkness of its 
greatest desolation we must needs see a God Who 
bears it with us, Who uses it as a bond of our union 



104 



THE LAWS OF PROVIDENCE. 



with Himself, and prepares for it an eternal recom- 
pense in Heaven. 

The Cross — this is the word which henceforward 
shall express all the designs of God on man, a pilgrim 
in this land of exile. It is the word which shall 
contain the secret of his eternal destiny. In the 
Cross of Jesus Christ the soul thirsting for happiness 
shall find, with the free accepting of every ill, the 
beginning of every good. 

In the Cross is comprised every privation, and 
yet it shall come to pass that the servants of the Cross 
shall be the richest of men. The Cross, while it dis- 
engages man from all things, shall leave him wanting 
in naught. 

The Cross comprises every pain, and yet in the 
shadow of the Cross there shall be born a generation 
of heroic men who shall at once be the most joyous 
of all men and who shall taste with so much the 
greater pleasure the true delights of the heart, the 
more they shall have abhorred the mean enjoyments 
of the flesh. And they indeed we fit from the presence 
of the council rejoicing that they were accounted worthy 
to suffer reproach for the name of Jesus (Acts v. 41). 

The Cross comprises every ignominy, and it con- 
demns its followers to be the laughing-stock of the 
world. And yet there shall be found men despised 
of the world during their life who, after their death, 
shall be the object of a worship such as humanity 
never gave to its heroes and demigods. 

Such is the glory which Jesus Christ has attached 



SECOND LAW OF PROVIDENCE. 



105 



to our trials, and this glory whole and entire returns to 
its Author. The Saints indeed triumph by the Cross of 
Jesus Christ; but to Jesus Christ far more than to the 
Saints the honor of this triumph redounds. Contest 
if you will the miracles which the Man-God wrought 
during His mortal life ; close your eyes to the most 
dazzling light of history, deny that by the words of 
His mouth and the touch of His hands He gave 
sight to the blind and hearing to the deaf, motion to 
the palsied and life to the dead ; but what you can- 
not deny is that daily, through the virtue of His 
Cross and the contact of His love, He works a mir- 
acle not less astounding by making men to love all 
that nature most abhors, by making them find in the 
most utter privation their hearts' full content, by 
crushing souls under trial and making them whole 
again, consuming them in the crucible of affliction to 
make them find once more that freshness of life which 
the withering breath of pleasure had dried up, by 
forming through abnegation and annihilation of self 
the only race of complete men which has yet ap- 
peared on earth. 

Of old a sect of philosophers tried to make man 
insensible to suffering, but only succeeded in making 
him proud and lying. He who cried when he was a 
prey to the tortures of the gout — " Oh, pain, thou 
shalt not force me to acknowledge that thou art an 
evil ! " — did not make his pain less keen because he 
refused to call it by this name. All that he gained 
from his philosophy was to put himself in contradic- 



106 



THE LAWS OF PROVIDENCE. 



tion with common sense. Jesus Christ acted quite 
otherwise toward pain and grief. He left it its name ; 
He does not hinder us from recognizing it as an 
evil. But this evil He makes the price of the greatest 
good, the condition of our likeness to Him, the bond 
which unites our heart with His Heart, the highway 
of glory, the sovereign process of becoming divine. 
Henceforth pain and grief become, not indeed in- 
different — they could not be that — but lovable and 
supremely to be desired. And the world shall see 
not a sect of philosophers but an entire society of 
men of every condition and every age adoring suffer- 
ing symbolized by the Cross, embracing it with ten- 
derness as did St. Andrew, the Saviour's disciple ; men 
who truly love the Cross, who quit all to take it up, 
mounting up on it as on their chariot of victory, in- 
toning their hymn of triumph, up to the moment 
when they yield their last breath to the crucified 
God. 



IV. 

The sins of men serve to glorify Jesus Christ. 

The glory of God springs not only from trial and 
from physical evil, it is also derived from moral evil — 
from sin. It is the same with the glory of Jesus 



SECOND LAW OF PROVIDENCE. 



107 



Christ. It is a new application of the law by which 
God associates Jesus Christ with Himself in all His 
rights toward creatures. 

There is perhaps no aspect of the mission of our 
Divine Mediator which brings out more shiningly the 
wisdom, goodness, justice, holiness, in a word, all of 
the attributes of God. Therefore the name of 
Saviour, which precisely declares this side of His 
mission, has become His proper name. In truth the 
Mediator between the guilty one and his Judge ought 
most of all to apply Himself to this, namely, to 
bring about a forgetfulness of the crime which ex- 
poses the former to the chastisement of the latter. 
Our Mediator would have had a great mission to 
fulfil, even if we had not sinned, there is no doubt of 
this ; but after our sin His mission is summed up in 
the expiation and reparation of this fault. All His 
efforts then shall be directed toward this end. We 
must not doubt that He will show forth in pursuing 
His aim all His power and resourcefulness. This is 
His masterpiece — it must at any price be worthy of 
His hand. 

Evil, as we have seen, may serve God's glory in 
two ways : either by the free repentance of the sinner 
to whom it is pardoned, or by the chastisement of the 
criminal who refuses to receive his pardon. In the 
first case it is the mercy of God that triumphs over 
sin, in the second it is His justice. These two 
triumphs are both glorious to the Almighty. 

Reason understands this without difficulty. But 



108 



THE LAWS OF PROVIDENCE, 



what reason could never have found of itself, what 
the most perfect intelligence could never have sus- 
pected, is the means of making to triumph at one and 
the same time in the reparation of the same fault 
both mercy and justice ; to inflict on this fault a 
punishment severer beyond compare than the eternal 
torments of the guilty, and at the same time to par- 
don it with a goodness immeasurably more generous 
than if it had been forgotten as soon as committed ; 
to set up between the expiation and the offence that 
perfect balance which immutable justice vainly pur- 
sues through the centuries without end of an unhappy 
eternity, and yet to make by descending to the level 
of an infinite evil the chastisement available to the 
guilty one for an infinite dignity and bliss. 

Is it not true that if this problem had been set 
before the greatest genius and the most enlightened 
intelligence of the angels apart from the Incarnation, 
it could not have been considered otherwise than as 
a plain absurdity and an absolute impossibility. Yet 
this impossibility became a fact, and each time that 
we pronounce the name of Jesus we make an act of 
faith in the realization of this apparent contradic- 
tion. This wonderful design has become so simple a 
thing for us that it has ceased to strike us. The 
greatest of all miracles no longer appears to us other 
than the most natural of all events. Perhaps if we 
consider it more nearly we shall learn to admire it 
more. 

I. Nothing is clearer than that God's justice has 



SECOND LAW OF PROVIDENCE. 



109 



been satisfied superabundantly by the death of His 
Son. For in what did the disorder of sin consist? 
In the fact that man, a being of nothing, had dared 
to revolt against his Creator and to deny to Him in 
the face of creation His inalienable title of last end. 
He owed Him obedience ; this obedience was re- 
fused. Instead of praise he had given insult, and in- 
stead of love indifference : to the Infinite Good he 
had preferred a passing pleasure. It is plain that the 
gravity of an insult is measured by the dignity of the 
person offended, and the value of the reparation is 
proportioned to the worth of him who makes it. 
Man is nothing, and when he has offended his God, 
can never worthily repair the offence. It should 
seem that God's justice must renounce the obtaining 
of full satisfaction. To give it to Him it would be 
necessary to unite together two qualities which ex- 
clude each other : passibility which allows of suffer- 
ing, and infinity which gives to suffering sufficient 
worth. Yet we see these irreconcilable extremes 
brought together by the Incarnate Word, in the unity 
of His Person. As man He can suffer, and as God He 
gives to the least sufferings of His humanity an infinite 
price. Sin thus finds superabundant reparation. 
The majesty of law had been violated by the free dis- 
obedience of a man of clay, but with what splendor 
has the atonement been made by the free obedience 
of a Man-God. The infinite goodness of God was 
outraged when a passing satisfaction placed in com- 
parison with it was preferred to it. How glorious 



110 THE LAWS OF PROVIDENCE. 



was its vindication when Jesus Christ Who, without 
God's displeasure, might have enjoyed all the goods 
of earth and heaven, to please Him more faces every 
sorrow. What are all the sufferings of the reprobate 
when compared with the expiation which a God dying 
upon the cross offers to the justice of His Father ! 
Where does God show better that hatred of sin 
which is essential to Him, than when he so pitilessly 
follows up, not indeed the disorder, but the mere re- 
sponsibility in the person of the Holy of Holies? 

II. At the same time God shows strikingly and 
beyond all thought His measureless love for sinners, 
and His mercy triumphs along with His justice. Whilst 
He expiates the crimes of His brethren, the Incarnate 
Word calls on them to join in the expiation. If they 
hear the call, what shall happen ? Behold, since the 
atonement of the Man-God is infinitely more than 
enough, it has, along with the virtue of blotting out 
the greatest crimes, that of meriting the greatest 
graces. Therefore the sinner who is the greatest 
criminal, by means of light suffering united through 
love with the sufferings of his Saviour, may merit 
along with the pardon of his iniquities the graces 
which will make him a Saint. A sinner like the 
Magdalen may in a moment become a sister of 
Angels, and her sins which but now were as coals of 
hell-fire upon her head shall become the subject of 
her thanksgiving and the food of her love. 

More yet : these sins shall be for our merciful 
Saviour, Who pardons them, so many titles of glory, 



SECOND LAW OF PROVIDENCE. 



Ill 



and the forgiven sinner may justly console himself 
with having added to the crown of the Son of God as 
many bright rays as he has committed offences against 
His Father. The offences are blotted out, but the 
glory which springs from their expiation shall shine 
in the crown of Jesus Christ during all eternity. 

Listen to the Saviour Himself. The Pharisees 
reproached Him with the goodness with which He 
sought after men the most reviled and sat with them 
at meat. They that are well, He made answer, have 
no need of the physician, but they who are sick : for I 
came ?iot to call the just, but sinners (St. Mark, ii. 17). 
This was as much as to say to them that His whole 
mission on earth was limited to the destruction of 
sin j but at the same time it was to say that all His 
glory was to spring from the gravity of the faults 
atoned for by His grace. This is as true as that the 
reputation of the physician grows in proportion to 
the number and intensity of the diseases which he 
cures. Jesus Christ shall show Himself so much the 
more a Saviour, He shall merit so much the more 
His name of Jesus, as He shall have healed wounds 
the deeper. As many sins as are expiated, so many 
degrees of glory are added. It is true that the sin- 
ner cannot claim for himself the merit of this glory, 
for he has contributed to it only by his wickedness. 
Clearly all the merit comes back to the Saviour. 
But the sinner may well find in it the subject of im- 
mense consolation and eternal gratitude. 

How many things might still be said on this 



112 



THE LAWS OF PROVIDENCE. 



great subject ! How easy it would be by consider- 
ing it from another point of view to show in its very 
deepest mystery, in that reversing of things which 
makes the Innocent One bear the responsibility of 
His brethren's crimes, the divine consecration of one 
of the deepest laws of the social order. How glorious, 
could we fix our gaze upon it, would seem the victory 
of the Head of the army of the elect. Entering naked 
and unarmed into the lists, He has won it over the 
Prince of darkness, who is armed with every advan- 
tage gained by forty centuries of triumph ! But, 
aside from this subordinate point of view, let us turn 
to the whole general aspect of this great work. Can 
we deny that through Jesus Christ God has drawn 
from moral evil a glory beyond measure ? Can we 
doubt that all this glory flows back upon the One 
Who has wrought it? Ought not we rather to say 
that the honor of the redemption first of all belongs 
to the Incarnate Word Who has executed it, and 
only through Him reaches God the Father, Who is 
its last end even as He was its first beginning ? 

III. To Him also must be given the glory not 
less striking, but alas ! of mournful splendor, to rise 
up to God from the impenitent dwellers in the city 
of tears. 

Jesus Christ died for all. At some moment of 
their lives all have been put by God's mercy in con- 
dition to take possession of the heavenly inheritance, 
which He had acquired for them by His blood. 
God alone knows the secret paths by which He tried 



SECOND LAW OF PROVIDENCE. 



113 



to bring back so many souls who to all appearance 
were separated from Him beyond recall by the very 
circumstances of their birth. All that we have to 
do is to believe firmly that, apart from children dead 
without baptism and adults who have never had full 
use of their free will, not one reprobate crossed the 
threshold of the abyss until he had very deliberately 
refused the salvation which was offered him and had 
trampled under foot his Redeemer's blood. But if 
this is true, is it not to this merciful Redeemer, Whose 
call they have refused to hear and Whose graces they 
have scorned, that throughout eternity the terrible 
expiation of their despair shall be due ? They shall 
understand what they are by their own fault, and 
what they might have been by His goodness; they 
shall understand the fruit His blood would have 
borne in them had they permitted it to have its effect 
upon their souls, and the fearful compensation they 
are constrained to give because they have despised it. 
How will it be possible for them not to confess that 
He was truly their only Saviour, the only foundation 
on which they should have built, the corner-stone on 
which they might have rested had it not been for 
themselves, and against which they have been broken 
because they have striven against it. 

It is true, therefore, that evil like good of ne- 
cessity turns to the glory of the Incarnate Word. 
God the Father constrains the enemies of His Son in 
spite of themselves to come one after the other and 
bend before His throne and serve at His footstool, 
8 



114 



THE LAWS OF PROVIDENCE. 



and even their resistance shall exalt His glory. If 
their resistance is atoned for by sincere repentance, 
it shall make His mercy shine forth ; and the mercy 
of God shall be manifested with so much the more 
splendor as it triumphs over more obstinate resistance 
and heals maladies more deeply rooted. But when 
the rebellious soul hardens itself and dies in its sin, 
then it is God the Father Who takes into His own 
hand the cause of His outraged Son and constrains 
the guilty one in eternal punishment to expiate that 
infinitely precious blood which he has trampled 
under foot. We cannot doubt that all the men who 
are in the world, even as all the creatures who are in 
the universe, are but instruments Providence employs 
for the great end of all, which is the glory of Jesus 
Christ. 

Not a movement in heaven, on earth or in hell, 
which does not advance this great work ! Some 
labor at it as faithful servants who work out the will 
of their master, or better as devoted children taken 
up with the interests of their father. Others are like 
slaves who, with no other recompense than the 
scourge, do just the contrary of what they would 
wish to do. We may choose between these two con- 
ditions. On one side there is freedom, love, hope, 
and a throne at the side of God ; on the other is the 
slavery of Satan and a part in his despair, in his 
hatred and his eternal pain. 



SECOND LAW OF PROVIDENCE. 



115 



V. 

The peoples should glorify Jesus Christ by recognizing His 
Kingship. 

We are still far from having gone through all 
the titles which, in the Person of the Incarnate Word, 
accompany the glorious title of Mediator. Our sub- 
ject, however, does not demand this of us. But 
there is one of these titles which we cannot pass by 
in silence, because it sums up the rights of our Divine 
Saviour over peoples as well as over individuals, and 
consequently allows us to complete what we have to 
say on His providential mission. This title is that 
of King. 

I. There is no prerogative which has been more 
solemnly and in a way officially attributed to God 
the Saviour than this. The angel who announced 
His birth to Mary at the same time declared Of His 
kingdom the)'e shall be no end (St. Luke, i. 32). 
Scarcely was He born when kings hastened from the 
depths of the East to proclaim His title in the very 
palace of Herod, and came to lay their presents at 
His feet. Later on the whole Jewish nation, united 
in Jerusalem for the celebration of the Pasch, ac- 
knowledged in Him the meek and gentle King whom 
the Prophet Zacharias predicted ; and Jesus Himself, 
to promote this acknowledgment on their part, came 
forth from His wonted reserve and used His temporal 



116 



THE LAWS OF PROVIDENCE. 



power to take to His own service the beast of burden 
that should serve to His triumph. More than this : 
even Pilate, impelled like Caiphas by a prophetic 
spirit of which he was not conscious, inscribed on 
the Cross and, in spite of all opposition, maintained 
there the title of King, which Jesus Christ took into 
His full possession by His death. The splendor of 
His dignity, so far from being effaced by His suffer- 
ing, was recognized in this state by the chosen thief 
who asked Him a place in His kingdom. Thus even 
on earth Jew and Gentile, the holy prophets of the 
ancient synagogue, the repentant robber and the 
cowardly representative of the Roman power, all 
agreed in hailing the Incarnate Word with the title 
of King. 

Moreover, who shall dare to refuse Him this title 
since God His Father with authority decreed it unto 
Him centuries before His birth, and since He Him- 
self as He mounted up to heaven with no less author- 
ity claimed it. 

Ask of Me, the Most High has said to Him, and 
I will give Thee the Gentiles for Thy inheritance, and 
the utnwst parts of the earth for Thy possession (Psalm 
ii. 8). In these words two promises are comprised: 
the inheritance and the possession of the inheritance. 
The inheritance belongs to the Son in virtue of His 
Sonship ; but the taking possession may be more or 
less delayed. When it shall please the Son of God 
to take into His hands the full actual authority over 
His kingdom of the earth, we cannot know; but that 



SECOND LAW OF PROVIDENCE. 



117 



He has the full, rightful authority we cannot call in 
doubt without doubting His divinity. When God 
the Father united a human nature to the Person of 
His Son it was impossible for Him not to communi- 
cate at the same time all the rights of this Divine 
Person, so far as that nature was capable of receiving 
them. Now, the authority of the earth, or rather the 
absolute empire over all creation, is assuredly one of 
those prerogatives which in no wise conflict with the 
humanity of our Saviour. 

Therefore we cannot deny Him this royalty and 
empire. Listen to St. Paul, God hath appointed His 
Son Heir of all things (Hebrews, i. 2). He is speak- 
ing of Him through Whom God has revealed Him- 
self visibly on earth, of Him Who maketh purgation of 
sins, and consequently of Jesus Christ, not only as He 
is God, but as He is man. And thus he at once 
shows us the Most High obliging the very Angels to 
adore this God-Man when He bi'i?igeth Him into the 
world (ibid., 6). Elsewhere the same Apostle sums 
up in a few words the whole Christian philosophy of 
history. He shows us the earthly life of humanity as 
the warring period of the reign of the Saviour, 
whereas eternity is the period of triumph and of peace. 
When He comes forth from the bosom of His Father 
the Divine Warrior promises to subject to Him at the 
price of His own blood the rebellious earth ; and the 
Father, on His side, promises to crown His combats 
with full victory. This struggle of God the Son in 
behalf of His Father, and of God the Father in favor 



118 



THE LAWS OF PROVIDENCE. 



of His Son, is what we see in way of accomplishment 
before our eyes. For we must confess with St. Paul, 
Now we see not as yet all things subject to Him (He- 
brews, ii. 8). All things shall finally be subjected to 
this Heavenly Conqueror, when He shall have brought 
to 7iaught all principality and power and virtue of hell ; 
afterwards the end shall be — end of the present order 
and the beginning of a better order. As a victorious 
general, He shall deliver up the kingdom to God and 
the Father in peace. Meanwhile, He must reign, but 
His authority must be shown by the resistless force 
with which He puts under foot all His enemies. 
And the enemy — death which once seemed to con- 
quer Him — shall be destroyed last. Then indeed all 
things shall be put under Him ; and yet undoubtedly 
He is excepted who put all things under Him. Then 
too, when all things shall be subdued unto Him — with 
the whole of creation fully subjected to His power — 
He shall acknowledge with solemn homage the author- 
ity of Him from Whom He holds all His power — 
Him that put all things under Him. Thus God, Who 
is all in Him, shall be through Him all in all (i Cor- 
inthians, xv. 24-8). 

St. Paul then allows no doubt of the Kingship 
of Jesus Christ in the present order quite as much as 
in eternity. 

But Jesus Christ Himself, if possible, is still 
more explicit. When He was about quitting His 
Apostles and was to confide to them His spiritual 
authority, He seems to have made it a point clearly 



SECOND LAW OF PROVIDENCE. 



119 



to lay down His rights. In this wise He speaks to 
them : All power is given unto me in heaven and in 
earth (St. Matthew, xxviii. 18). Therefore He is not 
alone the High Priest of the new law, but He is also 
the King of kings. If He had no royalty but that 
spiritual Kingship which is confounded with His 
Priesthood, He would not have all power. If He 
ruled at will only the blessed spirits, He would not 
have all power on earth as in heaven. Therefore 
He is very truly a King, a spiritual King and a tem- 
poral King, the King of souls and of bodies, of *peo' 
pies as well as individuals. Other kings hold their 
dominion only from Him. They keep it only as 
He is pleased to wish, and they are far more strictly 
bound to obey His laws and glorify Him than their 
own ministers are bound to obey them. Therefore, 
to acknowledge loudly Jesus Christ as their supreme 
Lord, to guide themselves in all their relations, 
civil and political, according to the maxims of His 
Gospel, to recur to Him in their necessities and to 
thank Him for their successes, to vindicate His majesty 
from public outrages done to Him and to favor the 
extension of His kingdom on earth — such are the es- 
sential duties of sovereigns and of peoples, from the 
time of the Incarnation. 

To doubt it would be to doubt the Incarnation 
itself. We should believe that the Son of God came 
into the human family, that He sanctified the world 
by His blood, that He reigns in Heaven over the 
whole universe— and yet we would persuade ourselves 



120 



THE LAWS OF PROVIDENCE. 



that the nations of the earth are free to look upon 
Him as though He had not come, and to treat Him 
as a foreigner. He has published a law which 
reaches to every relation of men with men, and yet 
in all social and public relations this law would be 
as a dead letter. The angels of Heaven are bound 
to glorify Him, and the peoples of the earth would 
not be so bound. This would not only be an absurd 
lack of reason but also a revolting impiety. 

II. We can have no doubt of this. The same 
law that obliges the peoples to glorify God in their 
collective existence and their social action, obliges 
them also to glorify Jesus Christ. 

When God the Father sent Him into the world 
and made Him the Head of all humanity, He gave 
Him empire over the peoples no less than dominion 
over individual souls ; or rather since man cannot 
live in isolation and since society is an essential con- 
dition of his nature, the individual royalty of Jesus 
Christ cannot be conceived apart from His social 
royalty. The establishment of this royalty on earth 
is the end which Providence pursues in the revolu- 
tions of the modern world, just as the preparation for 
this royalty was the end of the revolutions of the 
ancient world. 

Each people has its share in this great work. 
They come forward, one after another, at the time 
marked out by Providence. Power is given them to 
work out their mission, and according as they fulfil 
it with more or less fidelity they receive as a recom- 



SECOND LAW OF PROVIDENCE. 



121 



pense the success which produces the glory and the 
good things that make up prosperity. Thus, before 
the coming of Jesus Christ all the great monarchies 
— the Chaldeans and Assyrians, the Medes and Per- 
sians, the Greeks and the Romans — were, one after 
the other, brought into relation with the people who 
held the promise of the Messias and were called to 
help on the destinies of this people. At the moment 
when they fulfilled this mission was the height of 
their greatness. Never was Chaldea greater than 
under Nabuchodonosor, when Daniel was preaching 
in Babylon the coming of the Messias. Never was 
Persia more glorious than at the moment when Cyrus 
was reading that prophecy wherein he is represented 
as the type of the great Redeemer to come. Never 
were the Greeks so formidable as when Alexander 
venerated the Holy Books in Jerusalem, and never 
was Rome stronger than when she concluded with 
the Machabees a treaty of alliance. God seems to 
have raised up these different peoples, one after the 
other, only that they might the better see the light ; 
and their decline began only from the day when they 
wilfully closed their eyes to the light which had been 
presented to them. 

Thus, too, in the modern world, the people of the 
North, when they had come forth from the forests 
where they had passed their infancy in barbarism, 
were brought into the presence of Jesus Christ, and 
summoned to put to His service the unconquerable 
energy which He had bestowed upon them in order 



122 



THE LAWS OF PROVIDENCE. 



that they might execute His justice on idolatrous 
Rome. We are well aware of that true greatness 
which Jesus Christ bestowed upon them as the rec- 
ompense of their services. 

Thus, too, shall it be until the end of time with 
all the nations which shall come forth upon the stage 
of the world. Their appearance, their growth, and 
their triumph are unavoidably governed by the same 
law and guided toward the same end. We can say 
that it is only from the moment when they are 
brought into contact with Jesus Christ that the differ- 
ent peoples come to a consciousness of themselves 
and definitely take their place in the human family. 
Until then they only vegetate in a childhood more 
or less rude ; their life is rather animal than human ; 
all true progress is forbidden them ; the Divine im- 
pulse is wanting to them. 

Man acquires the full use of his reason and, in 
all the force of the word, becomes a moral agent only 
when he learns to know God, his first beginning and 
last end. In the same way, the peoples come to the 
full consciousness of their destinies and the power of 
working them out, only when they gain the know- 
ledge of the God-Man, Whose authority overrules all 
human society and Whose glory is the term of their 
revolutions. 

Therefore Providence has neglected no means 
to make the Christian peoples understand from their 
beginning this supreme law of their existence and 
this necessary condition of their prosperity — their 



SECOND LAW OF PROVIDENCE. 



123 



obligation to serve Jesus Christ and to glorify Him. 
It is in the preamble of the Salic Law, in the Capit- 
ularies of Charlemagne, in the Testament of St. 
Stephen, the first king of Hungary.* 

There we see with what clearness, in those times 
which we call barbarous, there had been grasped the 
fairest idea which the human mind has ever conceived 
— the idea of a Christian society. Later on, to pre- 
vent this light from being obscured, God did not fear 
to work miracles. We might cite many, Let us 
content ourselves with one which cannot be denied, 
unless we wish to give the lie to the most certain 
monuments of history. All the researches of science 
in regard to Joan of Arc have ended only in bring- 
ing out more clearly her supernatural mission. Now, 
according to her own testimony, the aim of her mis- 
sion was to restore the kingdom of France into the 
hands of Charles VII. on condition that he would do 

*From an historical work of Augustine Thierry we take the 
translation of a part of the Salic preamble : — 

" Ever rule Christ Who loves the Franks : may He keep 
their kingdom and fill their leaders with the light of His grace ; 
may He protect their army ; may He grant them the signs which 
witness to their faith, the joys of peace and happiness ; may 
our Lord Christ direct in the ways of piety the rule of those 
who govern : for this is the nation which, brave and strong, 
shook from its neck the harsh yoke of the Romans, and which, 
after it had known the holiness of baptism, sumptuously adorned 
with gold and precious stones the bodies of the holy Martyrs 
whom the Romans had burned by fire, mutilated by the sword, 
or torn by wild beasts." 



124 



THE LAWS OF PROVIDENCE. 



homage for it to the King of Heaven, who promised 
on His part to do for him as He had done for his 
ancestors. At her first interview with the king, Joan 
said to him, " The King of Heaven commands you, 
by my voice, to be consecrated and crowned in the 
city of Rheims, and you shall become the vicar of 
the King of Heaven, as every true king of France 
should be." It is in the name of this same King of 
Heaven, the Son of the Virgin Mary, to Whom alone 
belongs the kingdom of France, that Joan summoned 
the king of England to evacuate it at once. 

Alas, it is far from being the case that this in- 
comparable dignity of vicars of Jesus Christ for the 
temporal government of the people has been perfectly 
understood, whether by Charles VII. or by his de- 
scendants. Let us suppose for a moment that all had 
understood it as did St. Louis. What would have 
happened? The great schism of the West would 
have been impossible, for surely they w r ould have 
ranked the interests of the peace of the Church above 
all the rivalries of nations. Without having recourse 
to the hateful severity which the house of Valois in- 
termingled with guilty weakness, they would have 
prevented heresy from invading the kingdom and 
would have spared it those religious wars which, for 
half a century, were its devastation. All the vital 
forces expended by these two lamentable revolutions 
would have been used in increasing the national pros- 
perity. The abuses which were their consequences 
would have been prevented or repressed. The dis- 



SECOND LAW OF PROVIDENCE. 



125 



orders of the clergy and of the nobility would have 
been corrected by the agreement of the two powers. 
The vices of the old system would have been elim- 
inated before the bloody revolution of the last cen- 
tury had been provoked. What would not have been 
the prosperity of France within itself and its power 
without? We can scarcely doubt that its irresistible 
ascendency would have led other nations to adopt 
this great Christian scheme of politics — the only sys- 
tem which safely watches over every interest, and 
provokes no jealousy. And if it had come to this 
point, how much more prosperous would be the con- 
dition of the world to-day than it is in reality ? 

Europe, instead of being enfeebled by its own 
dissensions at the time when the discovery of the 
compass put the empire of the world into its hands, 
migth have leaped forth, strong in its union, to the 
conquest of universal empire ; and, at this present 
hour, Christian civilization everywhere triumphant 
would make of all humanity one great family peace- 
fully occupied in working out the mission which God 
gave it from the beginning — to order the world ac- 
cording to equity and justice (Wisdom, ix. 3). But 
the kings would not understand ! They preferred a 
political system of jealousy and expedients to that 
lofty policy of principles and Christian devotedness. 
For the Divine Thought which moves worlds, which 
would have given them resistless power had they 
frankly relied upon it, they substituted the petty cal- 
culations of their own ambition and the revolutions 



126 



THE LAWS OF PROVIDENCE. 



of dynasties. Heresy which combats Jesus Christ, 
and the Church which glorifies Him, became in their 
hands tools to be used indifferently, turn by turn, as 
they believed it to be their interest. They did not 
seek in the first place the Kingdom of God and His 
justice, and for this reason they have lost even that 
which they sought and which God would have added 
to them without fail. 

And yet how patient has God been toward 
them ! How many times has He replaced within 
their hands that power which they had so well de- 
served to lose ; how many times has He set them once 
again on the way from which they had departed to 
cast themselves into the abyss. 

What He did for the ancient house of France is 
what He does for every government which events 
bring into power in Christian societies. To all He 
makes the same proposal. He offers to glorify them 
if they will consecrate themselves to establishing the 
Kingdom of His Son. If we reflect well upon it, we 
shall see that the moment when they accept His offer 
is the period of their greatest splendor. May the 
great God, Who wills the happiness of the peoples, 
give to those who govern them the light and strength 
necessary to understand and fully accept this mission, 
to work it out without allowing themselves to be 
hindered by any obstacle and to undergo with 
courage the trials at the price of which they are to 
purchase certain triumph ! 

III. So far we have sought in the designs of God 



SECOND LAW OF PROVIDENCE. 



127 



only a demonstration of that necessary bond which 
exists between the destinies of the peoples and the 
fidelity w T ith which they labor for the glory of Jesus 
Christ. It will be easy for us to find a new proof of 
this truth in the effects produced upon the world by 
the Incarnation of the Son of God. 

Let us note it well, the Incarnation of the Eter- 
nal Word of God has created for modern peoples, 
along with new duties, needs and exigencies which 
the ancients knew not. In vain will Christian nations 
in revolt try to content themselves with that light 
sum of religious truth which might suffice to pagan 
nations for reaching a high degree of splendor. Ever 
since the blood of a God flows in the veins of 
humanity, it has started up therein boundless and in- 
satiable ambitions. 

Look through the historians who have drawn out 
the most faithful pictures of ancient society. Seek 
there some trace of those aspirations toward equality 
and fraternity which torment the modern world. 
Whence comes it that those immense herds of slaves, 
whom the legislations most extolled for their wis- 
dom brought down to the level of the vilest cattle, 
seemed not to suspect that they were the equals of 
the master to whose tyrannical caprice they were sub- 
jected ? Whence comes it that they bore so patiently 
a yoke which Christian humanity could no longer 
support ? Whence comes this contrast between the 
jealous sensitiveness of the lower orders in modern 
times and the patient degradation of ancient slavery ? 



128 



THE LAWS OF PROVIDENCE. 



Whence comes it if not from the indestructible in- 
fluence which the Christian revelation exercises over 
the very hearts that reject it ? Modern society may 
have put away the heavenly consolations and divine 
assurances which Jesus Christ came to bring into the 
world ; but it is not able altogether to stifle the in- 
stincts of greatness which He has awakened in the 
human soul. It may have forbidden itself to hope in 
His promises ; but it cannot succeed, in spite of every 
effort, in hoping in any other Saviour nor in content- 
ing itself with a lower elevation than that to which 
He has called it. 

For centuries society has been accustomed to see 
Jesus Christ in the twofold authority which presides 
over the religious and the civil order, and while it 
obeyed His vicars it gave obedience only to Him, 
the Man-God. Henceforth society knows not how 
to bend before an authority which is merely human. 
The poor, who once respected and loved the rich, 
while they saw in them the ministers of the charity 
of Jesus Christ, are no longer able to forgive them 
their wealth now that it is shown to them as a mere 
gift of chance and the food of selfishness. In one 
word, the social balance can never be recovered until 
the cross of a God Who made Himself as nothing 
adds to the lot of the wretched all the weight of His 
divine hopes. 

In the same way, the glories of the Christian faith 
have given to minds, through their relation to relig- 
ious dogmas, needs which no other worship had 



SECOND LAW OF PROVIDENCE. 



129 



found along its way. Outside of Christianity, see 
how all the religions have covered entire continents 
with the shadows of their deadly errors. They offer 
to human reason no motive of credibility which in 
the least resembles truth : their dogmas are but a 
tissue of revolting absurdities. Their history is made 
up of inept and disgusting fables, their worship, 
which one would say had been invented with the aim 
of degrading human nature, unites in equal propor- 
tion obscenity with savagery ; and yet for centuries 
these infernal religions found in their adherents the 
blindest docility. One would say that the intelli- 
gence of these unhappy races had been paralyzed ; 
whereas, in the midst of nations which Christianity 
has enlightened, those very minds which reject its 
light are devoured by uneasy curiosity and unceas- 
ingly bring every truth in question, and appear 
equally incapable of gaining certitude or of resting 
in error. 

We may then assert in all confidence, that apart 
from Jesus Christ there is henceforth for the peoples 
of the world no other faith nor certainty, neither 
hope nor rest. 

Each day it becomes more evident that for the 
modern world there is no other alternative : either 
it must re-establish the empire of Jesus Christ, or 
overthrow the last support which upholds the social 
order. Apart from the authority of Jesus Christ, apart 
from the religion of Jesus Christ, there can be no 
religion and no authority. And as authority and 
9 



130 



THE LAWS OF PROVIDENCE. 



religion are the two most essential elements of society 
— the first constituting its organization, and the second 
maintaining its unity and harmony — we have the right 
to conclude that outside of the Christian society there 
is no society possible in the modern world. Either 
Jesus Christ or barbarism ! 



CHAPTER III. 



THIRD LAW OF PROVIDENCE : THE KINGDOM OF JESUS 
CHRIST IS TO BE ESTABLISHED IN THE WORLD 
BY THE CHURCH. 

This final law, if we once come to understand it 
thoroughly, will bring out in its fullest light the de- 
signs of God on peoples as well as on individuals. 
By its means we shall be in condition to understand, 
in their most practical application, the conditions of 
our salvation and our progress. 

God does everything with order. He does not 
throw out into the world His creatures without union 
and mutual dependence, in order that they may work 
out their destiny individually and alone. On the 
contrary, He desires that in the midst of their bound- 
less variety there should reign a unity which outside 
of Him shall reproduce the perfect unity of His own 
essence. 

Undoubtedly God is the first and only principle 
of all things ; it is He who has created all and pre- 
serves all and governs and directs all toward its end. 
Yet, though He acts everywhere, nowhere does He 
act alone. Everywhere He makes use of the action 
of creatures to preserve and set in motion other 
creatures, so that while He does all He seems to do 
nothing. In the same way, God indeed wills to be 

(131) 



132 



THE LAWS OF PROVIDENCE. 



the common end of all things, but He also wills that 
created things should tend in common to this end, 
and that they should attain it, one by the other, so 
that the most perfect only attain it immediately 
and lead up to it creatures that are less perfect. From 
this springs that wonderful hierarchy which subordi- 
nates one to the other all created beings and makes 
of all creation one great body of admirable pro- 
portion, wherein spirits are the soul and life cir- 
culates by an uninterrupted action of one member on 
the other. 

It is not otherwise in the moral order. Jesus 
Christ, as we have seen, is at once the beginning and 
the end of this order. His grace is its beginning, as 
His glory is its end. But the souls which make up 
the moral world are not to receive individually and 
alone the grace of Jesus Christ and are not to procure 
His glory individually and alone, any more than the 
beings which make up the physical world are to re- 
ceive individually the action of the Creator and to 
tend to their last end alone. Unity is the attribute 
of the Word and of the Holy Ghost as much as that 
of the Father. It is, therefore, to be the law of the 
redemption and of the sanctification of souls, quite as 
it has been the law of creation. 

Therefore, there shall be in the world of souls, 
as in the world of bodies, a hierarchy which shall 
constitute its beauty, order, strength, and life. 

Undoubtedly, far more than in the physical or- 
der God shall be everywhere present in it 5 and shall 



THIRD LAW OF PROVIDENCE. 



133 



everywhere act. But there, as in the physical order, 
He shall not act alone. It is the light of the Eter- 
nal Word which alone shall enlighten spirits ; but 
this light shall be communicated to them by other 
spirits. It is the heat of the Holy Ghost which alone 
shall enkindle hearts ; but this heat shall be commu- 
nicated to them by other hearts. 

There too, as in the firmament, shall be chief 
stars which shall give movement to the others, and 
shall draw them in their attraction around the Sun of 
Justice, which is Jesus Christ. All that shall refuse to 
yield to this attraction, all that shall put itself beyond 
the pale of this supernatural hierarchy and society, 
shall thereby put itself beyond the influence of the 
Divine Sun ; for outside of the moral hierarchy there 
is only moral nothingness — that is to say, sin and 
condemnation — just as outside the physical hierarchy 
there is nought but physical nothingness. 

This moral hierarchy, this society of souls who 
together and in common tend to the glorification of 
Jesus Christ and communicate each to the other its 
own light and grace, we have no need of naming 
specially. There is no one who does not recognize 
under these features the Catholic Church. 

The Church is, therefore, the necessary inter- 
mediary between men and Jesus Christ, or rather the 
Church is Jesus Christ Himself continued and com- 
pleted by humanity, just as she is humanity made di- 
vine through Jesus Christ and in Jesus Christ. 

The Church is a great body, all of whose mem- 



134 



THE LAWS OF PROVIDENCE. 



bers receive from Jesus Christ, their Divine Head, 
life and heat, strength and love. The Church grows 
ever through the ages, and ceases not to draw new 
elements from the bosom of the corruption of 
human generations to assimilate them to Jesus 
Christ, until at last the mystical body of the Man- 
God shall have attained its full growth, and the 
world which exists only in view of its formation 
shall be destroyed and all its members shall rejoin 
their Divine Head in the joys of their true country. 

The Church, then, is in reality nothing else than 
the complement of the Incarnation and the contin- 
uation of Jesus Christ. It is through her that the 
teachings of Jesus Christ are to be transmitted to us. 
It is by her that all His precepts are to be intimated 
to us. By her, the heat of His love is to enkindle our 
hearts ; and by her the water of grace that makes 
alive is to be poured forth in our souls. 

Through her our Divine Saviour follows out in 
the world that work which He but began during the 
thirty-three years of His mortal life. In her He 
undergoes the same trials, combats the same enemies, 
suffers the same persecutions and the same martyr- 
dom, He gives us the same examples, works the same 
miracles, renders to God His Father the same wit- 
ness, and shows to our wretched humanity the 
same merciful condescension and the same generous 
devotedness. 

But if this is true, we must of necessity admit 
that the glorification of the Church, conjointly with 



THIRD LAW OF PROVIDENCE. 



135 



the glorification of Jesus Christ, is the great duty 
of humanity and the end which humanity must 
necessarily pursue, if it would correspond with 
the designs of the Creator and enter into posses- 
sion of the heritage and bliss which is its destiny. 

We have really no need of other proof to de- 
monstrate the truth of this last law of Providence. 
However, as it is of chief importance to our end 
that it should be perfectly understood, we shall seek 
its demonstration, not now in the thought of God, 
but in the very nature of things. From this second 
point of view, it will be easy to convince ourselves 
that obedience to the Church and union with her is, 
for individuals and for peoples and for all humanity, 
the necessary means of sharing in the fruits of the 
redemption and consequently the indispensable con- 
dition of salvation, of progress, and of happiness. 



i. 

The Church is the source of salvation and progress for in- 
dividuals. 

If there is anything evident in the world, it is that 
the progress of society depends upon the progress of 
the individuals of which society is made up. In the 
same way, on the progress of societies depends the 
progress of all humanity, which is simply the sum 
total of earthly societies. 



136 



THE LAWS OF PROVIDENCE. 



Reason tells us this, but modern rationalism 
thinks otherwise. For it the progress of humanity is 
everything; the progress of the individual, on the 
contrary, is an insignificant thing with which it 
scarcely deigns to occupy itself. There is no happi- 
ness of which they do not dream for the species ; 
what they forget is to point out to individuals the 
duties whose accomplishment can alone secure this 
happiness. They trace magnificent plans for the 
crowning of the edifice, but they do not disquiet 
themselves about how the foundation is to be laid. 

The Church does not act in this way. In her 
and in her alone, human nature finds with its true 
unity every element of its perfection. What, indeed, 
is the humanity of pantheistic rationalism ? It is as 
invariable as a formula of algebra and yet it alone is 
real, whereas individuals like simple phenomena pass 
along its surface and disappear without return, as do 
the shadows of the clouds on the surface of the 
ocean. What is this but pure fiction? What con- 
sequently is the progress dreamed of for this chimer- 
ical humanity save a vain chimera? On the contrary, 
nothing is more rational than the doctrine of the 
Church. She takes humanity in its living reality — 
that is, in individuals — and strives to secure its true 
perfection by laboring for the perfection of individ- 
uals with a culture as fruitful as it is hidden and 
laborious. 

The first principle of this making perfect is 
Jesus Christ, as we have seen. But Jesus Christ, as 



THIRD LAW OF PROVIDENCE. 



137 



we have also proved, manifests Himself to men only 
through the Church. Therefore the Church also, 
after Jesus Christ and with Him, is the necessary 
principle of individual progress. 

How, indeed, shall this human being whose life 
is so short, be able to perfect himself and along with 
himself his fellows? The first condition of his pro- 
gress is that from his start along his course, he shall 
have a clear and exact knowledge of the end whither 
he should tend and of the way by which he should 
reach it. In other words he should discern from 
the first awakening of his intelligence, truth from 
error and good from evil. Moreover, it is necessary 
that from the moment when that measureless need 
of loving, which constitutes his will, shall impose 
upon his soul its irresistible exigencies, an object 
shall be proposed to him worthy of his affections 
and capable of satisfying them. 

On the contrary, what can be more incompatible 
with man's progress than to remain for a time more 
or less long in uncertainty as to the end he is to at- 
tain and the duties he is to perform ? What would it 
be if this uncertainty should last as long as his life ? 
What more fatal to a spiritual soul than to feel a 
boundless hunger and thirst after love, and to have 
within its reach only a gross object which, instead of 
satisfying it, can but degrade it ? 

Now this precisely is the condition of man out- 
side the Church of Jesus Christ. No other authority 
than the authority of the Church speaks with cer- 



138 



THE LAWS OF PROVIDENCE. 



tainty to the child's mind at the age when convic- 
tions are formed, and tells him what he should be- 
lieve and what he may hope for. No other brings 
within reach of his heart, before the storms of pas- 
sion have blasted it, that food of heavenly love which 
alone can give it the fulness of life. 

On the contrary, see how easy is the progress 
of a soul which the Church has taken into her 
motherly arms from the moment of its appearance 
on earth. Scarcely has its intelligence begun to 
unfold itself than the Church presents to it the light 
of her teachings, w T hose splendor she is careful to 
temper that it may not wound the eye still feeble. 
Read in Bossuet's Catechism the preliminary chap- 
ter, which comprises what is to be taught to the 
smallest children, and you will see how the Church 
in twenty questions is able to comprise a sum of 
dogma and moral teaching infinitely more lucid 
and completer than all the treatises of ancient phi- 
losophy. God the Creator and the Master to serve, 
evil to hate, Jesus Christ to lov r e, His blessed Mother 
to call upon — these indicate the end to attain, 
the way to follow, the dangers to avoid, and the 
means to take. Is not this all? The riddle of 
destiny whole and entire has already been resolved 
for the young soul. Already in the features of Jesus 
Christ the Saviour, the ideal of beauty and of good 
stands revealed. Morning and evening the gentle 
representative of the Church, the first priest of the 
domestic hearth — the Christian mother — shall turn 



THIRD LAW OF PROVIDENCE. 



139 



the eyes of her child toward this ideal and stimulate 
his heart to rise toward Him on the wings of prayer; 
and in proportion as the child advances in age, the 
light shall grow in splendor, the end to be reached 
shall be seen more clearly, the perfection to be re- 
alized shall be better understood, the features of 
Jesus the Saviour shall start forth with greater exact- 
ness and charm. This living and Divine Ideal of all 
virtue and of all beauty, as it rises higher and higher 
above the horizon of the understanding, shall exercise 
over the will an attraction ever stronger, until the 
solemn day of Communion comes, that is to say, the 
day when between the Ideal and Its image — between 
Jesus Christ and the Christian — there is set up a per- 
fect identity of feeling and of life. 

From this moment the Church shall never cease 
to recall to the Christian that great duty which com- 
prises at once all his obligations and all his greatness 
— the duty of reproducing in himself the life of 
Jesus Christ. To understand how far this tender 
Mother of souls has succeeded in mingling the 
thought of Jesus Christ with every circumstance of 
her children's life, we must leave these countries 
where the unfolding of her spirit has been arrested 
by the icy breath of unbelief. We must breathe the 
pure air of Christianity in countries where the simple 
manners of the ages of faith have been preserved, in 
some province which is more Christian, in Tyrol or 
in Catholic Switzerland. There you shall see at 
every corner of the way the Cross appear, to recall to 



140 



THE LAWS OF PROVIDENCE. 



the traveller that at the end of his journey an infinite 
bliss awaits him purchased at the price of the blood 
of God. The Cross shall be found in the inn where 
at evening you shall stop to take your rest ; but here it 
shall be surrounded by pictures of the Saints, the elder 
brothers in the great family, devoted protectors who 
aspire only to make easier for us the imitation of the 
Divine Model. Instead of unmeaning wishes, all 
whom you encounter by the way will give you, as 
their brotherly greeting, the praise of Christ. 

Everywhere Jesus Christ is found filling the life 
of the family. His feasts during the time of each 
revolution of the sun renew the mysteries of joy or of 
sorrow which He wrought out while on earth, and 
give to the seasons of the year a variety and charm 
which nothing can replace. When is the hearthstone 
brighter than on Christmas night ? When is the 
table surrounded by faces more open than when the 
Alleluia of Easter has scattered afar all the sadness of 
the week of sorrows? Each region attaches to 
each feast its own particular usages, which bind in- 
dissolubly the civil with the religious life, and make 
of the house of Jesus Christ the centre towards 
which converge all the joys and all the interests of the 
whole country. 

Could we understand it if it were otherwise? 
Would it be possible that the tabernacle where the 
Man-God dwells visibly in the midst of men should 
not contain all the hopes and all the riches of the 
true Christian ? There, on the day of his first Com- 



THIRD LAW OF PROVIDENCE. 



141 



munion, he has tasted the purest joys of his life ; 
thither he shall often come to renew that unspeak- 
able bliss. There, when the six days of labor have 
bent him to the earth, he shall come on the Sunday 
to breathe the air of heaven. At the Holy Table the 
Word of God gives Himself corporally to him, under 
the appearance of bread ; and from the pulpit, the 
same Eternal Word communicates Himself to him 
spiritually under the veil of speech. It only depends 
upon himself how often he shall be seated at this 
double feast. The Church has the table ready 
dressed, and the Divine Food is always ready. By 
her harmonious chants, by the splendor of her cere- 
monies, by her incomparable solemnities, she realizes 
herself that exhortation which she unceasingly ad- 
dresses to her children, Sursum corda / She makes 
constant efforts to lift their hearts above the earth ; 
and as the eagle incites her little ones to fly by her- 
self flying above them, so the Church, rising unceas- 
ingly towards Jesus Christ, draws her children 
with her toward that only goal of all their aspira- 
tions. 

This is how the Church labors unceasingly to 
make man divine through Jesus Christ. Her teach- 
ings and her precepts, her Sacraments and her liturgy 
have no other end. In this work she employs that 
immense hierarchy of ministers which embrace the 
earth as with a net, and that other army, not less 
numerous, of which the different Religious Orders 
make up the battalions. To this she devotes herself 



142 



THE LAWS OF PROVIDENCE. 



unrelentingly, in spite of all resistance, of ingratitude, 
of bloody persecution. 

Would we be assured that she has in her hands 
all the means necessary for realizing this sublime end, 
we have only to read the lives of the Saints — that 
is, the lives of men who have given themselves 
up without resistance to the action of the Church. 

Of this we cannot doubt : in the bosom of the 
Church man finds from his entrance into life during 
the whole course of his earthly existence, a living 
light to guide him, a Divine Model to imitate, an 
easy way to follow, powerful helps to sustain his 
weakness : whereas outside of the Church he finds 
but uncertainty, error, weakness, shameful falls and 
despair. 

The Church then is the necessary bond which 
attaches us to Jesus Christ, and through Jesus Christ 
to God. She is, with Jesus Christ, the only way of 
our perfection ; in Him and through Him, she is the 
life of souls. Undoubtedly, Jesus Christ remains 
always the Source of all our good, our Liberator, our 
Redeemer, our Master, our Guide, our Head, the 
Author and Finisher of our salvation ; but it is only 
through the Church that Jesus Christ transmits to us 
the fruits of His redemption. It is only through her 
that He instructs us, guides us, makes us alive and 
divine. It is then only through the Church that our 
becoming like to Jesus Christ can be made perfect. 
He alone can make complete men, by making them 
divine men. Hence we have the right to conclude 



THIRD LAW OF PROVIDENCE. 



143 



that the true intellectual and moral progress of souls 
shall be in proportion to the fidelity with which 
they accept the teachings of the Church, observe her 
precepts, and take part in her Sacraments. 



ii. 

The Church is the source of progress for the peoples. 

I. The Church is the ever fruitful principle of 
progress in souls; and by the very fact she is the 
source of progress for the peoples. For the progress 
of any people, as we have already observed, can be 
nothing else than the general result from the progress 
of all its individual members. 

What indeed is society other than an order 
among free agents, just as the world {the cosmos) is 
order among material agents? Now, whence can 
this order result except from the faithfulness with 
which each free will shall keep the place marked out 
for it and make all its own abilities serve to promote 
the common end? Once this has been laid down, 
it is clear that an institution which exists in the 
world with the end of unceasingly recalling to souls 
their destiny and their duties, of holding ever before 
their eyes the divine ideal which they should realize, 
and of furnishing them with all powerful motives to 
draw near to Him, even at the price of the most pain- 
ful sacrifices; with the end of leading them to lift 



144 



THE LAWS OF PROVIDENCE. 



themselves up above their selfish interests to devote 
themselves unreservedly to the common good — it is 
clear that such an institution is eminently social, and 
that the progress of the peoples shall of necessity be 
in proportion to the influence which they give to this 
institution in their midst. 

We do not need to say that this institution is no 
other than the Catholic Church. History proclaims 
loudly enough, that from the time that this Holy 
Church sprang forth from the pierced Heart of her 
Divine Founder, she has never ceased to fulfil in the 
world the divine offices which we have pointed out, 
and thus to labor at the perfecting of societies by per- 
fecting the individuals which compose them. 

II. But there is something more than this influ- 
ence which is already so powerfully exercised by the 
Church on social progress by means of the elements 
designed to produce it. We cannot deny her an in- 
fluence yet more direct, inasmuch as she is the model 
society. She offers in herself to all other societies the 
divine ideal of their perfection. She thus points 
out to them by a teaching as practical as it is unceas- 
ing the means they are to take to attain their perfec- 
tion. 

By founding His Church, God has done for 
societies what He has .done for individuals by the In- 
carnation of His Word. 

He had in Himself, in the Trinity of His Per- 
sons, the ideal of society ; just as He had in the sov- 
ereign perfection of His Word the ideal of the reason- 



THIRD LAW OF PROVIDENCE. 



145 



able soul. In reality, it is enough to reflect for a few 
moments on this first mystery of our faith to discover 
in its luminous darkness the realization in a supreme 
degree of all the conditions which make a society 
great and strong, indissoluble and happy. 

For what do we hud there? The three essential 
elements of a society : one only Head, God the Father, 
Beginning without beginning, Who acknowledges 
nothing above Him ; an Eternal Mediator, the Son, 
Who receives His being from the Father and Who, 
united with the Father in a common operation, trans- 
mits this being to the Holy Ghost ; finally, the Holy 
Ghost, the Third Person, proceeding from the two 
others in the order of production , and in consequence 
receiving from them, without of Himself producing 
anything in the Divinity. And among these Three 
Persons, types by way of eminence of the three 
members of all human society — ruler, minister, and 
subject — we see the realization, with unspeakable per- 
fection, of those relations which ought to unite to- 
gether these members in order to secure to society 
all the perfection of which it is capable. We see the 
authority of the Father, reserving to Himself no 
other prerogative than that of communicating to the 
Son and to the Holy Ghost ail His riches, all His 
happiness, His whole Being. We see the Son, the 
Eternal Mediator, the prime minister of the Father, 
reflecting back His thought with infinite faithfulness, 
to transmit it whole and entire to the Divine Spirit, by 
a co-operation of love. We see, last of all, the Holy 
10 



146 



THE LAWS OF PROVIDENCE. 



Ghost receiving this ineffable communication of the 
being of the Father and of the thought of the Son, 
only to give back to Them by love as much as He 
has received from Them, to serve as a bond between 
Them, and to be the consummation of Their unity and 
Their bliss. 

It is impossible for us not to see in this impene- 
trable mystery the reconciliation of all the opposing 
tendencies which rend society asunder — the union 
of perfect subordination with perfect equality: 
of the most absolute authority in the superior with 
the most absolute dependence ; of submission the 
most complete on the part of the inferiors with the 
freest development of all their powers ; of utter dis- 
interestedness with unfailing and immediate remu- 
neration for the gift which each makes of himself. 

Yes, in this mystery, so scorned by those short- 
sighted minds who cannot pardon the sun for being 
too bright for their feeble eyes, in this mystery and 
not elsewhere must we seek the final answer of all 
those problems whose explanation our modern 
societies are demanding — from dreams and daggers. 

Yet we must confess the truth. The Most Holy 
Trinity is the supreme type of the society of reason- 
able beings ; yet this type is raised so high above 
common intelligences that humanity would never 
have been capable of following out its realization, 
had it not become incarnate in a visible society, just 
as the Eternal Word — the type of the reasonable 



THIRD LAW OF PROVIDENCE. 



147 



soul — became incarnate in a nature like to our 
own. 

This incarnation of the Divine Society in human 
elements is the Church. 

Just as the Incarnate Word is at once God and 
Man, so the Church is a society at once divine and 
human. She is divine by her invisible Head, Who is 
Jesus Christ, true God, and by her Spirit, Who is the 
Spirit of Jesus Christ, that is to say, of God. She is 
human, by her visible head who is simply a man, by 
her members who are also men and sinful men, and 
lowest of all by the acts which transmit the life of 
Jesus Christ from the Head to the members, and 
which are sensible and human acts. 

By these latter elements to which no imperfec- 
tion, no failing of human nature is a stranger, the 
Church resembles societies that are purely human ; 
and she makes accessible to them the truly divine 
perfection which she realizes in the midst of these 
imperfections and failings. 

The Church, indeed, is the living image of 
the ineffable Society of the Three Divine Persons. 

In her, as in the Trinity, authority is as conde- 
scending as it is sublime. Her authority shares by 
its origin in the very attributes of the Divinity; and 
in its exercise it keeps only the attributes of servitude. 
The Pope calls himself, and is in reality, the servant 
of the servants of God, because he owes himself, 
whole and entire, to the Church : Servus servorum 
Dei. Just as God the Father exists only on the 



148 



THE LAWS OF PROVIDENCE. 



condition of giving to the Son and to the Holy 
Ghost His being whole and entire, and is nothing 
outside of the act by which He communicates Him- 
self, so the Sovereign Pontiff possesses the divine 
prerogative of infallibility only in the act by which 
he transmits the truth to his brethren ; and this act 
once past, he is subjected like the lowest among them 
to the sentence he has pronounced. Moreover 
he can teach only what he has learned, and he 
has authority only to make the Divine Law observed. 

The pastors of the second rank are submitted 
like the lowest of the lambs to this supreme authority ; 
and, like the Son of God, they receive the rays of the 
divine light only to reflect them upon their inferiors. 
Whatever riches they may have it is only to scatter 
them abroad. Along with the divine power of 
conferring grace they have the corresponding obli- 
gation of using this power in favor of all those to 
whom it may be useful. Like the mountains their 
heads touch the heavens only to bring down to the * 
hills and lower valleys the moisture which shall make 
them fertile. 

Last of all, in the Church inferiority of rank in 
no wise carries with it inferiority of merit and glory. 
The only excellence worthy of ambition in the bosom 
of this society of souls is holiness. Now holiness is 
equally accessible to every rank of this hierarchy. 
The highway is open to all equally that they may 
reach to sovereign honor, and this way is the royal 
road of sacrifice. The more a man shall have stripped 



THIRD LAW OF PROVIDENCE. 



149 



himself of self in order to enrich his brethren, the 
more he shall have sacrificed himself for their happi- 
ness, so much the more shall he be, in the eyes of 
God and the Church, great and rich and happy. 
The grace of the Holy Ghost, of which the Church 
is the channel, shall give back to him in consolation 
and merit and true glory infinitely more than he has 
sacrificed by humility and abnegation. 

It is thus the Church realizes on earth and with 
human elements the reconciliation of the most irre- 
concilable things which we admire in the Divine 
Trinity: hierarchy and equality, authority and con- 
trol, submission and liberty, disinterestedness and 
superabundant recompense. All the social problems, 
which seem so insoluble when we study them out- 
side the Church, we find resolved within the Church. 
It is with reason therefore that we say that the 
Church is the model society, and we cannot in 
good faith mistake the immense influence she exer- 
cises under this title and in virtue of her existence 
alone over the progress of societies. 

Is it not she who has completely changed the 
notion of authority? Once authority was the ex- 
ploiting of the people for the benefit of the rulers. 
The Church has made the world understand that au- 
thority is only the first of social duties. 

The notion of obedience has not been less pro- 
foundly changed. Once obedience was an humilia- 
ting necessity ; under the influence of the Church it 
has become a glory by becoming a virtue. 



150 



THE LAWS OF PROVIDENCE. 



The notion of right itself has been transformed 
by laying its foundation in the common duty of all 
to obey God. Happiness, when sought after in this 
life, was the beginning of all disorder ; but placed in 
a better life as the recompense of the sacrifices of the 
present life, it has become the motive of the most 
heroic virtues. 

In this way all the social elements have been 
transformed under the divine contact of the Church. 
By her existence alone she maintains in the world 
the practical teaching of this social philosophy. 
Who can be blind to the bearing of this teaching 
and the effects which it cannot fail to produce in the 
very bosom of those societies which seem the least 
docile to the authority of the Church? 

III. To bring out this demonstration in its 
fullest light, we should be permitted to unfold before 
the eyes of our readers the annals of the Church and 
to show how, in spite of the human weaknesses to 
which her members have not ceased to be subject, 
she has fulfilled in relation to earthly societies that 
mission which her Divine Founder had confided to 
her. A very little good faith is enough for acknow- 
ledging that during the nineteen centuries of her 
existence she has been in very truth the light of 
the world and the salt of the earth (St. Matthew, v. 
13. i4). 

She has been the light of the world ; for like 
unto a divine beacon placed on the summit of the 
holy mountain, far above the region of storms, she 



THIRD LAW OF PROVIDENCE. 



151 



has not suffered error, even in the darkest hours, 
utterly to obscure the brightness of truth. And she 
is the salt of the earth because she defends the nations 
against the enticements of their dearest tendencies, 
against the corruption of their prosperity and the de- 
pression which would be the natural result of their 
reverses. 

Jesus Christ is the complete man because He is 
the Man-God, and He is the complement of all 
men. In the same way the Church, which is the 
only complete society, is the complement of all 
other societies. For it is with peoples as with indi- 
viduals : we find in each one of them, along side of 
some predominant quality, some predominant defect, 
and it is these prominences and defects taken to- 
gether, these lights and shadows, which make up the 
national character and the special physiognomy of 
each people. 

God wished that it should be so in order that 
the moral order, not less than the physical order, 
should show forth that character of variety with unity 
which constitutes the beauty and perfection of His 
works. He found it good that peoples like individ- 
uals should all have something to blame in themselves 
and something to admire in others ; that they should 
have need each of the other, and that no one of them 
should be able with impunity to isolate himself and 
seek to be self-sufficient. 

In the presence of this providential fact, whose 
reality is proved by the most superficial observation, 



152 



THE LAWS OF PROVIDENCE. 



it is clear that the perfection proper to each people 
must consist in giving full development to their pre- 
dominant qualities and at the same time in neutral- 
izing the influence of their predominant defects. But, 
just as it is easy to understand that these are in 
truth the essential conditions of the perfection of a 
people, so too it is plain that nothing can be more 
difficult for them than to fulfil these conditions. 

How, indeed, can we hope that the rulers shall 
habitually have the disinterestedness and the courage 
necessary to struggle against the current of popular 
prejudice and passion ? How can we hope that 
public opinion, that power which is superior to the 
rulers themselves, shall patiently consent to subject 
its pride and caprice to the great interests of truth 
and morality ? 

From this point of view, therefore, the peoples 
will need to be aided by an exterior power which is 
in a position to make itself respected without ever 
falling under suspicion ; whose power is supreme and 
yet whose influence is exercised only by persuasion ; 
an authority which captivates that which is most in- 
dependent in the world — intelligences and hearts — 
whose spiritual arms reach to the very depths of souls 
and destroy therein prejudice and stimulate generous 
instinct. Now, in the present and in the past, we 
should vainly seek a society which unites in itself 
these conditions outside of the Catholic Church. 

An example will make it possible for us to 



THIRD LAW OF PROVIDENCE. 



153 



measure the bearing of this influence of the Church 
over national character. 

Let us take an example as near ourselves as pos- 
sible. If we ask what is the special character of the 
French nation, the entire world will answer that its 
predominant feature is the spirit of proselytism, 
which results from a sort of impossibility of keeping 
for itself what seems to it true, beautiful, and good, 
joined with a resistless power of making other nations 
accept its own passions and ideas. 

From this point of view, modern France is in no 
wis'e different from the France of the Middle Ages. 
She is to-day what she was then — an essentially mis- 
sionary people. 

At these two epochs her action on other peoples 
has been equally irresistible ; yet how different or 
rather how opposite are the results. In the twelfth 
century France as a society took seriously her title 
of eldest daughter of the Church, and like a true 
daughter asked from her mother the guidance of her 
energies. This guidance was not wanting to her. 
The Church showed to France the sepulchre of 
Christ stained by Mussulman barbarism, and His 
Kingdom beleaguered on every side by the anti- 
Christian empire. France understood, and at the 
voice of the Supreme Pontiff she answered by her 
war-cry, " God wills it ! " And this cry which spread 
contagiously through all Europe by means of her 
proselytism had soon roused all the Christian peoples. 
Until then the ardor of the French character had 



154 



THE LAWS OF PROVIDENCE. 



been wrought upon only by vain ambition and 
murderous discord; but now it was consecrated to 
the noblest of all causes, and learned to pursue 
passionately the great interests of the spiritual order. 

We know what were the consequences of these 
heroic struggles. It is true that Jerusalem could not 
be delivered from the malediction which still weighs 
heavily upon it, but the anti-Christian empire was 
wounded unto death ; the torrent which threatened 
to sweep over civilization was forever rolled back 
from Europe. France herself became more united 
at home, and established to the confines of the East 
a moral preponderance which all her subsequent 
faults have not succeeded in wresting from her. This 
was the national character of France so long as she 
was under the influence of the Church. 

Six centuries later, weary of the glories which 
she owed to this maternal influence, France resolved 
to shake it off entirely and to be sufficient to herself. 
So-called philosophers, who made their philosophy 
consist in enfranchisement from the yoke of Incar- 
nate Wisdom, persuaded her that she would find 
liberty only in making herself independent of the 
Church which is the living organ of the Divine Wis- 
dom. She believed that the ideal of human society 
could be found in the absence of every superhuman 
element. At once she sought to realize this ideal. 
The ardor of her temperament knew no delay, and 
the chivalric disinterestedness of her character shrank 
from no sacrifice. Unhesitatingly she overthrew all 



THIRD LAW OF PROVIDENCE. 



155 



the supports of her prosperity. Under the pretext 
of destroying abuses which were unhappily but too 
real, she overthrew the social order on which these 
abuses were an accidental growth. She cast herself 
whole and entire, with her most venerable institutions 
and her most glorious traditions, into the mortar where 
she was to be crushed and whence, as she hoped, she 
was to come forth transformed into new youth. And 
she would not consent to keep for herself the blessings 
of this re-birth and transformation ; all other peoples 
must share them with her. A new crusade was under- 
taken ; but this time it was no longer to the cry 
" God wills it ! M The signal was given by the proc- 
lamation of the Rights of Man. The cry of inde- 
pendence — "I will not serve!" — non serviam — was 
to sound upon earth as at the beginning it had re- 
sounded in heaven. In response to this cry we no 
longer see as in the Middle Ages Europe uniting like 
a single family to push back the fierce tide of Mus- 
sulman barbarism ; but we see Christian peoples rush- 
ing against each other — an immense conflagration 
started up at one and the same time in the four cor- 
ners of Europe, threatening to engulf the grandest 
products of its civilization, and this conflagration was 
to be quenched only in torrents of the purest blood 
of France. And this is what our national character 
produced once it ceased to be directed by the influ- 
ence of the Church. We are right then in affirming 
that this benign influence is the source of the true 
progress of peoples ; and nothing is wanting it seems 



158 



THE LAWS OF PROVIDENCE. 



to us to the demonstration we have given of it. Not 
only does the Church, as the model society, offer in 
herself to all human societies the divine ideal of their 
perfection and prosperity ; but by her action, which 
is as gentle as it is effective, she never ceases to urge 
them forward and to aid them in realizing this ideal. 
She makes authority divine, and thus renders it more 
humble ; she exalts obedience, and thus makes it 
easy. She destroys the antagonism which pride 
and selfishness had set up between governors and the 
governed, between rich and pcor. On the contrary 
she causes them to find a common interest in uniting 
with each other and in mutual devotedness. She 
develops all the good tendencies of national character, 
and anticipates its deviations toward wrong. She 
prevents prosperity from intoxicating and adversity 
from depressing. Without ever hampering material 
progress, she does not allow it to become an obstacle 
to moral progress. In one word, she is in temporal 
societies what the soul is in the body — a principle of 
life, of movement, of well-being, and of true great- 
ness. 

IV. Let us now put what has been said on the 
mission of the Church beside the principles already 
established in relation to the collective duties of a 
people. We can thus already draw conclusions 
which will be of the greatest help to us in accounting 
for the ways of Providence. 

We have seen that a people, since it has but a 
temporal existence, must receive in the course of time 



THIRD LAW OF PROVIDENCE. 



157 



the recompense which it merits for its faithfulness as 
well as the chastisement which may be due to it for 
its shortcomings. In a word, the collective duties 
of a people, unless they are to have no sanction at 
all — which is repugnant to th j Divine Justice — can 
have only a temporal sanction. 

Now, these duties of a people are summed 
up, as we have proved, in one single duty : 
to glorify Jesus Christ by obeying His Church, 
or, what comes to the same thing, to glorify the 
Church by co-operating with her in the establish- 
ment of the Kingdom of Jesus Christ. It is 
solely to put them in condition to accomplish 
this great duty that a people receives from God riches 
and power. It is in view of the providential part 
which they are destined to play in the glorification 
of Jesus Christ by the Church, that they are endowed 
with aptitude and tendencies which make up their 
national character. Each one of them is an instru- 
ment fashioned and made ready by Providence to do 
a certain work, but this work cannot be accomplished 
unless under the Church's direction. Each one of 
them is a column designed to adorn and support the 
divine edifice of which Jesus Christ is the corner- 
stone ; but it is only by the Church, which is the 
chief pillar and secondary foundation, that each of 
the stones which are to enter into its construction 
can be brought into relation with the First Foundation. 

From this it follows that a people can deserve the 
temporal recompenses due on the part of Providence 



158 



THE LAWS OF PROVIDENCE. 



to fidelity only inasmuch as they are united to the 
Church, and their revolt against the Church must of 
necessity be followed by temporal chastisement, in 
proportion to the gravity of their crime. 

This is equally the consequence of the con- 
sideration of the designs of God and of the nature of 
things. 

It is true that this temporal sanction of the 
great law of Providence over the world may be held 
in reserve during a time more or less long ; the law 
of trial demands this, for this law is applied to a 
people as to an individual, and it would be utterly 
overturned if chastisement immediately followed 
evil and fidelity were always immediately crowned by 
recompense. 

Therefore, years and perhaps centuries will roll 
by between the beginning of the revolt and the 
thunderbolt which shall mark its end. During 
years and during centuries we may see a people 
hostile to the Church and flattering itself with the 
success of its enterprises, while the faithful people are 
humiliated by their seeming inferiority. Centuries in 
the life of peoples are as years in the lives of in- 
dividuals. This necessary delay, in order that trial 
may have its full merit, may seem very long to hu- 
man impatience, and it may cause in the ranks of the 
Church's army many defections. 

But for those who have the patience to await the 
hour of the Lord, that hour shall come at last ; and 
it shall be so much the more elorious as it shall have 



THIRD LAW OF PROVIDENCE. 



159 



been longer awaited. In faithful nations the Divine 
Life, preserved in spite of every human obstacle and 
long growing up in the invisible obscurity of souls, 
shall at last push forth its vigorous shoots and extend 
afar like strong branches all those institutions of 
science and charity, of art and industry which con- 
stitute true civilization. It shall be like a tree which 
is planted near the running waters, which shall bring 
forth its fruit in due season — the rich fruit of strength 
and devotedness, of genius and virtue. 

On the contrary, among revolted nations unbe- 
lief, the source of darkness, and selfishness, which is 
the principle of decay, after they have been long 
combated by the truths and virtues which are the 
results of the past influence of the Church, shall with- 
out fail finish by bringing forth their natural fruit. 
Little by little the light will go on failing, social 
bonds will be loosened, authority day by day will 
lose its prestige, and every right will be more and 
more brought into question. Souls will be abased, 
while animal lusts will acquire an influence more and 
more predominant. The appearance of strength and 
life which the stimulus of collective interests and 
national pride may give for a certain time, will dis- 
appear under the influence of selfish desires ; the 
great body once so vigorous, when a Christian life 
circulated in its veins, will soon be but a corpse, and 
then it will be enough that a hostile people shall 
spurn it with the foot to cast it into the tomb. 

This is what comes of necessity in the train of 



160 THE LAWS OF PROVIDENCE. 



all the great movements which impel people toward 
the Church or drag them far from her. It is by the 
happy or unhappy consummation of these social 
tendencies that the history of humankind is naturally 
divided into great epochs like to those great divisions 
of time which are marked by the accomplishment of 
the revolutions of the stars. As the sun, approach- 
ing and receding, governs the seasons of the year, 
so the Church by the increase or diminution of her 
influence determines the periods of history. 



in. 

The Church is the source of the progress of humanity. 

What the Church is for the nations, she must 
evidently be for humanity. Humanity, indeed, is 
only a great society which is made up of all particu- 
lar societies — the great tree of which iVdam is the 
common root, while the different boughs and branches 
are the races and nations and families. 

After the dispersion of Babel, these races and 
nations had preserved no unity. Even the memory 
of their common origin had been lost among the 
greater number of them. They had been separated 
by d-istance, by language, by prejudices and interests, 
and they scarcely knew how to meet without con- 
flict. From this sprang an obstacle to the progress 
of humanity, which seemed to be insurmountable. 



THIRD LAW OF PROVIDENCE. 



161 



For when a nation was able to make the conquest of 
moral truths, of political institutions, of scientific 
developments or material advantages, far from caring 
to share all these with other nations, it seemed only 
anxious to keep its acquisitions from them. There 
was in existence no society of nations ; there was no 
humanity in the modern sense of the word. There 
were men, there were families, there were races. The 
members of humanity existed, but the body did not 
exist because its members were scattered and rent 
asunder and united by no bond. 

When Jesus Christ became the Head of human 
nature and gave it in His grace a common principle 
of life and in His glory a common destiny and com- 
mon interest, He created humanity ; and this hu- 
manity, created by Jesus Christ, is nothing else than 
the Catholic Church. 

We have seen how this society of souls unites to- 
gether by a divine bond the members of particular 
societies, how it destroys their antagonisms and min- 
gles their rival interests in the great interest of the 
Kingdom of Jesus Christ, toward the establishment 
of which she makes them work together. We may 
now look upon her as she unites together the different 
nations which accept of their own will her influence. 
She forms from them a single family of brethren in 
the midst of which she reigns, not by the superiority 
of temporal power, but by the gentle supremacy of 
her divine mission and her motherly love. 

Let us not speak at present of the exterior action 
11 



162 



THE LAWS OF PROVIDENCE. 



which the Church has often exercised and which she 
might have exercised far oftener still to prevent the con- 
flict of peoples, had they consented oftener to accept 
fully her benign influence. There is an action closer 
and more irresistible, by which she keeps them united 
and almost without their knowledge anticipates the 
disastrous effects of national prejudice and antipathy. 
This action results from the very idea of the Church ; 
that is, from the dogma of Christian Faith of which 
she is the living and immortal realization — from 
the incorporation of all men and all peoples with 
Jesus Christ. In vain we should seek for a more effi- 
cacious means to destroy the rivalry and strife which 
rend humanity asunder than the mission, given to all 
the ministers of the Church, to bring back to men 
without ceasing that they are all called with equal 
title to share in the redemption of Jesus Christ, to 
form all together a single body of which He is Head, 
a single kingdom of which He is Monarch, a single 
family of which He is Father, and during all eternity 
to possess the same happiness. This is the true hu- 
manitarian doctrine, which St. Paul so often recalled 
to the first Christians, sprung as they were from every 
race and from every condition of human society. 
From this he drew the conclusion in his own ener- 
getic language : There is neither Jew nor Greek, there 
is neither bo?id nor free, there is neither ?nale nor fe- 
male, for you are all one in Christ Jesus (Galatians, 
iii. 28). 

By her constant preaching of this doctrine, the 



THIRD LAW OF PROVIDENCE. 



163 



Church labors unceasingly to consummate the work 
of Jesus Christ. He had for end and aim not only 
to make souls and peoples divine, but all humanity 
as well. On the eve of His Passion, this Divine 
Saviour asked of His Father, as the sweetest reward 
of all His labors, that all men might be made one — 
among themselves and with the august Persons of 
the Divine Trinity — as these Divine Persons are one 
among Themselves. The Church has been charged 
with working out this last solemn wish. For eighteen 
centuries she has labored unremittingly to realize this 
ideal. She suffers without ever giving away and, 
undiscouraged, she braves every persecution. To 
make all humanity participate in the union, the splen- 
dor and joys of the society of the Three Divine Per- 
sons ; to establish between heaven and earth an 
intercourse of light and love, in which all men shall 
have their part; to give to the mystical body of 
Jesus Christ its full development ; to establish each 
one of the societies which are the principal members 
of this body in the place and part which Providence 
has assigned it, and to make it find in the perform- 
ance of this part the full development of its energies ; 
in sum, to rebuild in all its harmony this great edifice 
of humanity, w r hose stones had been overthrown by 
sin and scattered afar, and to give it as its crown the 
Divinity incarnate in Jesus Christ — this is the social 
mission of the Church, and this mission she accom- 
plishes with no less fidelity than that which has for 
its aim the making divine of souls. 



164 THE LAWS OF PROVIDENCE. 

From this point of view, which is the only true 
one, it is easy for us to take in at a single glance in 
all their unity and variety the vocations of individ- 
uals and of peoples. We can understand the reason 
of the almost unlimited diversities, which we have 
already pointed out, in national character as well as 
in individual character. 

This diversity has not only for its end to show 
forth the infinite fecundity of Divine Wisdom, it has 
also and most of all for its end to mark out for each 
man and each people their own place in this collec- 
tive reproduction of Jesus Christ, which is the end 
and final reason of humanity. 

In truth, just as each man should be a reduced 
image of the Man-God, so humanity should reproduce 
Him in grand proportions. 

Each element of this great body, and especially 
each one of its chief members, should bring out in 
bold relief some one of the features which are grouped 
together in the Divine Model, their union in Him 
constituting His incomparable perfection. We must 
not then wonder that the different members are in- 
complete. Were they not so they could not form a 
single body. If in the human body the eye com- 
prised all that is found in the hand, and if the hand 
had all the properties of the eye, where would be 
unity and harmony and beauty ? But that which is 
wanting in each of the members, it finds in its union 
with the others. Separate them, and they cannot live 
for one single instant ; for there is no one of them 



THIRD LAW OF PROVIDENCE. 



165 



that possesses in itself all that is necessary to work 
out its destiny. Unite them, on the contrary, and 
whatever is incomplete in them will become for each 
one a means of fulfilling with more perfection its 
own office and of contributing with more efficiency to 
the well-being of the body. Thus it is with men and 
with peoples ; so long as they are not in the place 
which Jesus Christ has marked out for them in His 
Mystical Body, so long as they are not closely and 
generously united together to work out in common 
their divine destiny, they will be incomplete and 
feeble ; and whereas the defects of their own character 
will be a cause of weakness to them, their good 
qualities even will produce only strife and offence. 
It will be impossible for them to live the divine life, 
which is the only life worthy of man. But let them 
understand their vocation and labor with energy to 
fulfil itj let them unite in Jesus Christ through the 
Church, and earth shall see enraptured the trans- 
figuration of humanity take place, to be compared 
only with the transfiguration of our Saviour on 
Thabor. 

Then shall the Church be glorified by that very 
glorification which humanity shall receive from her ; 
and this glory of the Church shall fall back whole 
and entire on Jesus Christ, her Divine Founder, as 
the glory of Jesus Christ returns whole and entire to 
God the Father, from Whom He proceeds. Conse- 
quently, the designs of God upon the world shall 
then receive their full realization ; trials and physical 



166 THE LAWS OF PROVIDENCE. 

evil and sin itself shall have served to show forth 
His divine attributes. All the laws of Providence 
which are summed up in this last law shall have been 
fulfilled along with it. By humanity made divine, 
that is to say, by the Church, all creation shall be 
reunited to Jesus Christ and through Jesus Christ to 
God. 



The legislation of Providence reveals to us the 
secrets of Providence. It makes us understand the 
end and aim, the principles and the chief appli- 
cations of Providence. The end and aim of Provi- 
dence is the communication of God's life and happi- 
ness to reasonable creatures, the establishing of the 
divine order. 

The elements of this wondrous order are — first 
of all, God, the first beginning and last end ; next, 
Jesus Christ, God and Man and therefore the Mediator 
between God and humanity, just as humanity itself 
which is spirit and body is the mediator between 
the world of spirits and the world of bodies ; last of 
all the Church, that is, humanity united with Jesus 
Christ and living of His life, as Jesus Christ lives of 
the life of God. 

The pouring forth of this life is the end of all 
the designs of Providence. God alone possesses it 
by nature and by most complete identity with it ; 
the Man-God receives it by His personal subsistence 
in all its fulness ; reasonable creatures share in it in 
the measure of their union with Jesus Christ. It is 
a divine stream, of which God is the infinite source ; 
it flows within full banks like a grand river, through 
Jesus Christ ; and thence it pours itself forth on the 
whole earth in a thousand channels, bringing forth 
therein the fruits of grace. 

(167) 



168 



THE LAWS OF PROVIDENCE. 



Again, the divine order is revealed to us as an 
immense pyramid, at the summit of which is God, in 
the midst Jesus Christ, and the Church at the base. 
This base gpes on enlarging in proportion as human 
generations are multiplied. When it shall have 
reached its full development according to the plan 
of the Heavenly Architect, the present world shall 
have an end and eternity shall begin. 

Trial and physical evil, strife and moral evil 
itself, are the means which Providence uses to prepare 
the stones which are to find a place in the Divine 
Edifice. It calls societies as well as individuals to 
co-operate with Itself in the consummation of this 
work. It is pre-eminently the work of unity. It 
began from all eternity in God Whose Divine Per- 
sons are united in the most perfect unity of nature. 
It went on in Jesus Christ, in Whom the Divine 
Nature and the human nature are united in the unity 
of the same Person. It reaches out to all men, who 
are called to unite themselves with God through 
Jesus Christ in the unity of His Spirit. But it can 
have its consummation only inasmuch as all humanity, 
one in the unity both interior and exterior of the 
Church, shall form but one single family wherein the 
different peoples are distinct branches but not 
branches severed from the trunk. 

Such are the designs of the Almighty : such are 
the laws which Divine Providence has imposed on the 
free activity of men and peoples. 



CONTENTS. 



Page 



Editor's Notice 5 

Introduction - -- - - -- -- -- -- - 7 

Chapter I. — First Law of Providence : Whatever is done 

in the world tends to glorify God - - - II 

i. God's glory the end of creation- ....... 12 

ii. In the present order God's glory is the making 

man divine - 21 

iii. God's glory the result of probation ----- 43 

iv. Evil as well as good must glorify God - - - - 53 

v. The peoples are to glorify God 64 

Chapter II. — Second Law of Providence : is by Jesus 
Christ that God wishes to be glorified in the 

world - 75 

i. The glory of the Incarnate Word the end of creation 76 

ii. The making man divine the work of Jesus Christ - 88 

iii. The glory of God, of Jesus Christ, and of man the 

result of the imitation of the sufferings of the Man- 
God 101 

iv. The sins of men serve to glorify Jesus Christ - - - 106 

v. The peoples should glorify Christ by recognizing His 

Kingship -115 

(169) 



170 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER III. — Third Law of Providence : The Kingdom 
of Jesus Christ is to be established in the 
world by the Church 131 

i. The Church the source of salvation and progress for 

individuals- - - - - ------ 135 

ii. The Church the source of progress for the peoples - 143 

iii. The Church the source of progress of humanity - - 160 

Conclusion 167 



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ST. THOMAS AQUINAS ON THE INCARNATION, com- 
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